Hillary Clinton's allegedly tense and stormy relationship with President Obama is likely to become a lot more complicated now that the commander in chief is out publicly criticizing her disastrous 2016 campaign.

The failed presidential candidate's greatest mistake was that she ceded white rural voters to her opponent, Donald Trump, Obama told reporters this week.

The former secretary of state and her campaign team focused all of their time and energy on targeting urban areas, while ignoring voters in surrounding rural territories, many of whom had supported Obama. In certain states — Wisconsin, for example — she did not even bother to campaign because polling showed that she was far ahead.

For Obama, whose 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns included staff dedicated specifically to rural outreach, Clinton's strategy was, for lack of a better word, lazy.

"You know, I won Iowa not because the demographics dictated that I would win Iowa," Obama said Monday. "It was because I spent 87 days going to every small town and fair and fish fry and VFW hall, and there were some counties where I might have lost, but maybe I lost by 20 points instead of 50 points."

"There are some counties maybe I won that people didn't expect, because people had a chance to see you and listen to you and get a sense of who you stood for and who you were fighting for," he added.

Hillary Clinton's 36-year-old campaign manager, Robby Mook, argued during the election that the key to victory lay in courting young, Latino and black voters. They took for granted the minority of white voters in places like Youngstown, Ohio, that Democrats still need in order to win.

The one person on the Clinton campaign who pushed back on Mook's strategy was Bill Clinton, who launched a lonely, one-man war later in the election to court voters ignored by Mook and other senior staffers. Amazingly enough, the former president was reportedly dismissed outright as a has-been whose political star had faded long ago.

Hillary Clinton went on to lose to Trump across the Midwest.

President-elect Trump racked up immense margins in rural strongholds in key battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin. The billionaire business is almost certain to take Michigan.

Obama won 41 percent of rural voters in 2008. His support slipped in 2012 to 38 percent. Hillary Clinton, for her part, earned only 29 percent of rural and small-town voters, while Trump bagged an impressive 71 percent, according to exit polls.

Obama said this week, "How we organize politically, I think, is something that we should spend some time thinking about. I believe that we have better ideas, but I also believe that good ideas don't matter if people don't hear them."

"And one of the issues the Democrats have to be clear on is, given population distribution across the country, we have to compete everywhere. We have to show up everywhere. We have to work at a grassroots level, something that's been a running thread in my career," he added.

Considering this is the second time that an unexpected opponent has thwarted Hillary Clinton's White House ambitions, and that Obama is responsible for the first instance, the president's surprisingly straightforward public criticism of her campaign is unlikely to cool their reportedly strained relationship anytime soon.

Then again, seeing as how Obama's remarks vindicate Bill Clinton's personal crusade to court white working-class and rural voters, the president may have inadvertently cooled his reportedly longstanding acrimonious relationship with that specific member of of the Clinton family.