David Remnick profiles Bill Clinton in this week's New Yorker. You'll have to kill a tree or two to read the entire 23-page production, but a press release from the magazine offers up some of the choicest bits from the former president:
On his role in his wife's presidential campaign: "If she decides that's what she wants to do, I'll be for it, and I'll work for it, and I know what the deal is."
On whether he'll be a negative factor: "Only if people thought she wouldn't be her own person, and I don't think that will be a problem."
On upstaging Hillary at the funeral of Coretta Scott King: "I read about that, and I said, 'Hillary, if we both spoke at the Wellesley reunion, you'd probably get a better reception.' I said, 'You can't pay any attention to this.' I said, 'This is my life. I grew up in these churches ... You don't have to be better at this than me. You got to be better than whoever.'"
On Democrats, like Hillary, who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq: "This deal with Iraq makes me want to throw up. I'm sick and tired of being told that if you voted for authorization you voted for the war. It was a mistake, and I would have made it, too."
On the Bush administration's plan for "postwar" Iraq: "The sort of thing two students of international relations could have thrown together in forty-five minutes. They were arrogant. They thought it would be easy, and they thought there would be no terrorism, that everyone would be on their side."
On Democratic losses in 2000 and 2004: "I'm sick of Karl Rove's bullshit."
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