It’s perfect material for a tell-all memoir. In 2008, former President Bill Clinton called up Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) at 2 a.m. and bawled him out after Hillary lost South Carolina.
In what’s being described as a new tell-all, Clyburn tells Yahoo News‘ Jeff Zeleny that his relationship with the Clintons is pretty much on the mend since souring back then. His book is called Blessed Experiences: Genuinely Southern, Proudly Black.
But at 2:15 a.m. that night, Clinton was boiling. “If you bastards want a fight, you damn well will get one,” Clinton told him.
Clyburn defends himself, saying it wasn’t his doing that Hillary Clinton lost the South Carolina primary to then-Sen. Barack Obama. At the time, Clyburn had promised the DNC that he’d steer clear of the primary.
This time around, Cyburn is enthused about a Hillary Clinton run for the Oval Office. “She’d make an excellent president,” he says in the interview. “I hope she runs.”
The Clintons aside, the book doesn’t gush about President Obama. Clyburn gives the President a “B” and points to the firing of Dept. of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod as “a moment of tension.”
But then again, he says, he sometimes disagrees with his wife, who he’s been married to for 53 years.