To read the whole transcript go to:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/12/interview_with_bill_clinton_1

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President Clinton just did an interview with Charlie Rose that will be the talk of all political watchers.  I have edited the transcript to just the segment that deals with the primaries, the candidates and the political media.

Expect a Very Heavy Pushback from the Political Media to this interview Charlie Rose did with President Clinton.

One of the firm rules of the DC media village is that they shall "never be criticized" for ANY bad work that they ever do. Anyone that dares to go against this media commandment, must suffer a hard and terrible response. From of course, the same media being criticized to begin with. That's fair, right? Since the President dares to question them here in this interview, the pundit village will respond by insulting and attacking the President and of course, Hillary. Believe me, Bill knows this and disregards it. Here he is talking directly to Democratic voters.

Again, please remind me - how many delegates to the convention do the national political press corps have?

In the interview, President Bill explains how the political media and the Obama campaign distorted the "kindergarten" flap, the problems running for office too soon, the advantage of experience to a President, the politics of Iowa and NH, why the Irish HAD to speak with Hillary, why the Pundits don't know sh*t and other nuggets of wisdom.

Bill Clinton: All right. Let me just -- let's just unpack this.

Charlie Rose: That's exactly what I want to do.

Bill Clinton: Let's stay with the experience issue. I remember the first time Senator Obama said that, said, you know, Cheney and Rumsfeld had a lot of experience. And that has great superficial appeal. But let me make the argument in another context. That's like saying that because 100 percent of the malpractices case, medical malpractice, are committed by doctors, the next time I need surgery, I'll get a chef or a plumber to do it. I mean, the logical extension of that is inherently absurd. So it's not experience, it is what is your record as doing things for other people and proving you can make a positive difference in people's lives. And do you learn something from doing that other the years, including from your mistakes. I think you do, so that's the first thing. Secondly, there is nothing wrong with ambition to be president.

Charlie Rose: With all respect, you ought to know.

Bill Clinton: That's right. I think that -- but I think it's really, really interesting that, you know, I've heard Senator Obama, I don't know, a dozen times, seen him quoted in the newspapers making some fairly derisive and obvious comment about Hillary saying, you know, she had some decades-old plan to be president, repeating this total canard --

Charlie Rose: She made some remarks about him in some paper he had written when he was very young person that he wanted to be president, some essay somewhere. I don't think any of this makes any difference, do you?

Bill Clinton: No, but let's be fair here. That was how the papers reported it. That's not what happened.

Charlie Rose: Okay. Tell me what happened.

Bill Clinton: What happened was he kept saying -- he kept repeating this totally fabricated account from this anti Hillary book that she had had this decades long plan to be president. As if it were something bad. Because he didn't have a decades long plan to be president.

Charlie Rose: I know.

Bill Clinton: And so on her website, they put up reports from people who worked for Senator Obama that he was planning to run for president when he first got to the Senate, then he was planning it in the state Senate and then they put that kindergarten letter in. They thought that was funny. But Obama's people seized on it and got the press only to write about that, as if it was a mean thing. They thought it was funny. And I think it's funny -- now, look at this. Consider this. Here was Hillary's lifetime plan to run for president, right? She -- when she got out of Yale Law School, she could have gone to Chicago where she was from, taken a job in a big law firm, and looked for the first opportunity to run for office.

Charlie Rose: And lo and behold she bet on a politician who had just been defeated and had no money and was a professor at Arkansas.

Bill Clinton: Yeah. So her idea of planning to run for president was to move to the Arkansas Ozarks and marry a guy who lost the race to make $26,000 a year, and I was 42.

Charlie Rose: Not the best way to start running for president.

Bill Clinton: So it was inherently absurd.

Charlie Rose: But I just think all this is silly.

Bill Clinton: I do, too. But what she was doing was putting something on her Web site to reply to that.

Charlie Rose: Okay. So --

Bill Clinton: So he just got a few stenographers to write stories about the -- as if this kindergarten letter was serious. She thought it was funny. I think we need to be able to laugh at this. Look, we ought to want young people to want to --

Charlie Rose: Exactly.

Bill Clinton: -- grow up to be president.

Charlie Rose: Exactly.

Bill Clinton: It's not a bad thing.

Charlie Rose: But you just --

Bill Clinton: We ought to want girls to be believe there can be presidents.

Charlie Rose: I hear this in terms of what I read.

Bill Clinton: Yeah.

Charlie Rose: I read that you are very nervous about this now, that you are unhappy what's happened with the campaign in the last --

Bill Clinton: No, no.

Charlie Rose: You're here correcting things. And so let's deal with that. You are nervous about it.

Bill Clinton: Oh, no.

Charlie Rose: The race is tightening in New Hampshire and in Iowa, and people say Bill Clinton, the president, is not happy.

Bill Clinton: Well, no. Let me back up and say, in January when Hillary finally -- on New Year's Day, when I knew -- she finally said to me, okay, I want to try to do this. And I really didn't know if she was going to do it to win. I said, okay. I'll make you a prediction. All the press will say you will coast through the nomination, and you won't be able to be elected because you have high negatives and you're polarizing. I said, I predict to you that the reverse is true. I think you will have a difficult time getting nominated, bigger challenge. And if you are nominated, I believe you'll win the general election handily. So she said, why do you think that? And I said, well, I think it for several reasons. First of all, you have to start in Iowa. It's the single most challenging state in the country. You'd be better off starting in Illinois because you'll run easily second in Illinois and surprise everybody. Senator --

Charlie Rose: And you passed up the Iowa --

Bill Clinton: Yeah. But I did it because Tom Harkin was there.

Charlie Rose: Right.

Bill Clinton: But Senator Edwards has a well-earned, huge cadre of support in Iowa because he's worked it for seven long years.

Charlie Rose: As especially the rural areas.

Bill Clinton: Yes. Seven years. And she'd been to all those counties, and he's on his second [unintelligible]. Senator Obama is next door. That matters. I know. I ran better in Memphis.

Charlie Rose: You think that's the reason for the polls -- the fact that --

Bill Clinton: No.

Charlie Rose: -- they had been [unintelligible] it seven years there and Senator Obama lives next door or --

Bill Clinton: Well, I think they know that about -- first of all, on Edwards, there's no doubt. They have confidence in him. They know him. And he has run for seven years. And he's a very attractive man in the same way that Obama is.

Charlie Rose: Edwards on this program, sitting where you are, said the other day that if he was not in the race, most of his people would be supporting Obama.

Bill Clinton: Maybe. But you don't know that. I think -- well, let me finish.

Charlie Rose: Okay.

Bill Clinton: Let me finish. So look, I've done this before. I've -- when I lost New Hampshire to Paul Tsongas. I lost the first 10 miles next to the Massachusetts border. No one would admit they were voting for him or against me or anything because of that. I'm just telling you this makes [unintelligible]. I carried everything from 10 miles north up to the Canadian border. So I think that that certainly didn't hurt him. When he started, he got a little head start there. Then there are thousands of Illinois students in Iowa colleges. Those people have never ever caucused before.

Charlie Rose: Are you lowering expectations here in this conversation?

Bill Clinton: No, no. I'm telling you what I told her in January. You can't accuse me of lowering expectations because I disagree with the conventional wisdom and the political press. I almost always disagree with them. I'm not telling you anything I didn't say in the beginning. So he's been to like 75 counties. She's been to like 50, something like that. Because she's -- I think all the other candidates running missed at least three times as many Senate votes as she has, as least that was true as of about a month ago.

Charlie Rose: Are you unhappy with anything --

Bill Clinton: Let me finish.

Charlie Rose: Okay.

Bill Clinton: You started this. So let me finish. So my view of this is that I never thought she had a big lead in Iowa and never thought she could have one. Now Iowa people have been really fair to her. They've listened to her. They've given her a chance. And she might win there. And it is astonishing because from the beginning of this race she had a lead in 36 of the 38 states polled. She was running great in Illinois, to be in his state. She was winning North Carolina big, huge, in Senator Edwards' state.

Charlie Rose: Yeah.

Bill Clinton: And winning all these other states in the primary and not having good luck. Now, what has really happened? What I have been frustrated about has nothing to do with her campaign. It is that I believe that her -- the challenges in the polls in the moment I think will both be overcome, by the way. And I think I can feel in Iowa we're getting back -- depends on what people think the question is. But in New Hampshire, biggest problem there is is that the Republicans have been steadily attacking her for two reasons in all their debates. And they advertise against her and they do all stuff. And there are two reasons for this. One is, a lot of the Republicans running don't have particularly good credentials with the far right, and they're so really important in the primary process. So they're trying to make up for their lack of credentials by dumping on her. If you notice, almost no Republican senators have criticized her. They like her because they do things with her, they think she's an honorable person, they think she's a good person. Senator Lindsey Graham was one of the managers of my impeachment, wrote the tribute to her in -- when Newsweek or Time or whatever talked about the best young senators, first term senators. That -- those attacks affect independent voters who are very smart on the issues but don't like politics. They think you become polarizing when someone else attacks you. And she is not in a position to answer back what the Republicans are doing in the primary, not right now. So I think that has had a, you know, has not been good. And that's the second reason the Republicans are doing it. They think -- I know because I talk to a lot of them who are candid with me. They think she would be the hardest to beat because she has been vetted and because she consistently does better with Republicans as they get to know her and see what's she's done. So that's what's happening in New Hampshire. In Iowa, nobody wants to go negative on television, so really it's a war underneath the radar screen and it's -- has more to do with how the press interprets it than anything else. But most people are -- she was doing -- what broke her momentum there was the extraordinary attention given to her not very great answer on the driver's license for illegal immigrants.

The point is, the press should have a common set of standards and there should be no attempt to get between the voters and the politicians. They ought to make -- look. He's great. He doesn't -- she -- Edwards is really good. I'm telling you, you're underestimating --

Charlie Rose: I'm not underestimating anybody.

Bill Clinton: Edwards might win in Iowa.

Charlie Rose: That's what I hear.

Bill Clinton: And I think that -- but I think it's a miracle that Hillary's got a chance to win. She might win this thing in Iowa. And I'm not low-balling it. You can look at the facts here. I think it's a miracle, because of the way the thing has played out. But she is so good, if she just gets before enough people, and she would be the best president. I don't think it's close, if you believe the past record as an agent of positive change is a good indicator of future performance, I don't think it's close, who would be most likely to be the most good in the least amount of time.

Charlie Rose: And when people say we need to go beyond looking back at the '60s or even the '90s, then you say, I think a lot of good things happened in the '60s, and I think a lot of good things happened in the '70s, and the '90s.

Bill Clinton: If that's relevant. Look at this decade. Look at this decade. She has been a completely modern senator. She has sponsored -- she just passed a bill, as a candidate for president, with Lindsay Graham who led my -- who was one of the impeachment managers, to extend the family and medical leave law to the families of veterans who were suffering physical and emotional trauma in Iraq or Afghanistan. I mean that's --

Charlie Rose: Let me close with this point.

Bill Clinton: That's got nothing to do with the '90s. That's sort of a superficial, you know, bigotry. That's like saying ageism or something. It's like if you fought and did good things, we got to give you a gold watch and tell you goodbye.

Charlie Rose: Let me just close with this, because fairly we're over, and your people need to take you -- you need to go wherever you need to go. I've said this to you before. Because of your eight years of experience, because of your experience as a governor, and because you've spent your time since doing good, but traveling around the world, sometimes with your friend, President Bush 41. Tell me what you would put as the top five things for the next president, if you were sliding a little letter into that Oval Office desk. You can make it as short or as long as you want, from my point.

Bill Clinton: We have to restore American's standing in the world. We have to send a signal that we are going to get back in the cooperation business. And we're going to cooperate whenever we can, not only when we have to, including discontinuing our direct military involvement in Iraq as quickly as we can without making it worse. We have to regain our economic momentum to restore the middle class, which means we need more good jobs, and significant changes in our education policy. We have to have -- finally, we have to pass universal healthcare. What we're doing is costing us too much, doing too little, undermining our economic stability, and our -- the moral fabric of our society. We have to do something really significant on energy, for reasons of national security, global warming, and most -- and our economic well-being. We have got to move back toward a clean, independent energy future. It will create millions of jobs and promote more equality. And finally, we need to do this in a way that gives all Americans a chance to work together on it. One reason I like this whole idea of a clean independent energy future is it's inherently beyond politics. It gives people something to do across political lines, racial lines, income lines. It will benefit people in urban areas, suburban areas, small towns, rural areas. We live in an interdependent world where just a few people, as we found out on 9/11 or the British found out with their car bombings and their subway bombings, who don't feel part of the community can do an enormous amount of damage. The only way to overcome our differences is not basically to try to erase the past, it's to get used to working together. I mean it's kind of a metaphor for the Hillary argument. If you look at last Monday, the --

Charlie Rose: You are people are pushing me, so it's not my --

Bill Clinton: The new leaders of Northern Ireland came to Washington to see the president. They -- it represents a stunning change. I think everybody we met, right, stunning change in Northern Ireland.

Charlie Rose: It's unbelievable.

Bill Clinton: And they asked to see another person. They asked to see Hillary, because she played and independent role in their peace process when I was president, independent of me. Now who were these new leaders? Ian Paisley, who was a long time leader of their conservatives, and Martin McGuinness, who is one of the toughest guys in the Sinn Féin. They are the cold leaders of Northern Ireland. The Northern Irish didn't think that to turn the page, they had to throw out the people who had represented their respective points of view. They thought they were more likely to work together to effect positive change because of what they had done in the past. I think that has some resonance in this election, and as I said, let me say again, I -- you can, you know, probably just to get a political story and get a fight going, somebody will watch this interview and parse everything I said, and cut this phrase or that phrase out. It is stupid. I like all these Democrats. I will support whoever gets nominated. I think we are fortunate in having people who want to turn the page and take a new direction. I think the relevant question from me is who would be the best president based on who has a proven record of making change in the lives of other people. Therefore, I think she would be the best president. But that is, to me, what it all comes down to. And if you think about the Northern Ireland deal, they didn't go out and find two guys that happened to be a Protestant, and happened to be a Catholic.

Charlie Rose: Who had not been working at the problem.

Bill Clinton: Even the smartest, most eloquent, most attractive one. But America may want to make a different decision. It depends on what you think, you, the voter, you, Charlie, everybody watching us, should be the question of this election. The answer will depend on what you think the question is. But all this stuff that, you know, there's something wrong with one or the other of them. It's just not true. These are -- as near as I can tell, all these people are really good people. They are honest. They are articulate. They are intelligent. And there's a race here now because of factors that have developed. But if they hadn't, something else would have happened. We were always going to have a race. They do not give the presidency away. And that's a good thing. You all are going to have to fight for it.