All but acknowledging his wife's presidential campaign has fizzled to naught, Bill Clinton today argued she should be the number two person on the Dems' ticket.
Pushing his case, the ex-president re-tooled his spouse's earlier contention that a presidential candidate should be ready to command on day one.
A vice presidential candidate also has to be primed to preside immediately -- or at least by day 120 -- and no one is better equipped than Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton said.
"We all know that President James A. Garfield was assassinated four months after taking office," Bill Clinton said in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos.
Stephanopoulos' journalistic antennae shot up and he immediately asked the former president (who also happens to have been Stephanopoulos' former boss), "Don't you think the Barack Obama campaign will take offense at that?"
Bill Clinton turned beet red in the cheeks and the nose, glaring at his former press secretary before responding, "Do you think I'm going to stand here and let you play the race card on me when you know I wouldn't let them do it on me?"
Stephanopoulos let the matter drop but the interview was posted on You Tube and within an hour White House journalists were peppering Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino with questions on the growing controversy.
"Who's James Garfield?" was Perino's first reaction.
Told he was the twentieth president of the United States who was shot by an assassin and died two months later, in September of 1881, Perino said, "Uh-oh. I think we'll just watch from the sidelines."
As for the Obama camp, a spokesperson said that after the RFK flare-up she'd just as soon let this controversy die a natural death, as she hoped a certain ex-president would also do.