Former President Bill Clinton speaks at POLITICO's Playbook Cocktails event on Nov. 15, 2014, at the Little Rock Marriott in Little Rock, Arkansas. | M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO Clinton critiques Obama No action on immigration may have hurt in the midterms, the former president also said.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – Former President Bill Clinton said he was surprised by the Democrats’ lopsided losses in Senate races in this year’s midterm elections, and he suggested that President Barack Obama’s decision not to sign an executive order on immigration may have played a role in keeping some Hispanic voters at home.

He also said Obama should maximize his pulpit and not give in to being a “lame duck,” setting a high bar by saying he should turn to the budget process to try to push through his agenda in his final two years in the White House and that the president should also try to pass immigration reform. Above all, he said, Obama should try to have “fun” in the job.


Clinton made the remarks in an interview with POLITICO’s Mike Allen at an event held during the 10-year anniversary weekend of the opening of his presidential library in Little Rock. He answered questions shortly after delivering a speech in which he strongly defended his economic record, a theme he hit a day earlier in a separate speech.

Asked if he thought the midterms would be closer, given that a number of polls showed tight races, Clinton replied, “I did, yeah, I did. If you look at the exit polls you can see what happened.”

( Also on POLITICO: Genghis Khan and empathy: Some quotes by and about Bill Clinton)

He suggested that the turnout modeling in a number of states was off, particularly in states such as Georgia, Arkansas and West Virginia, citing the exit polls there compared to the polling in the lead-up to the elections.

“There was a collapse of the youth vote,” Clinton said. “The African-American vote held fairly steady and was remarkable … we had a little bit of a loss of the Hispanic vote perhaps because the president” didn’t sign an order on executive action on immigration reform.

“It was a tough call for him because had he done so a lot of others would have lost by even more,” Clinton added. “What that shows you is the people who were against us felt more strongly than the people who were for us. The people who were for us just in all the din couldn’t hear what was actually a fairly coherent economic message coming out.”

A group of immigration activists targeted Hillary Clinton at a number of her midterm campaign appearances, urging her to address the question of whether she supports Obama using executive action to ease deportations of undocumented immigrants. The former first lady, who is likely to run for president in 2016, has not expressed an opinion about it, dodging questions from activists in Iowa and at other stops.

( PHOTOS: Playbook Cocktails with Bill Clinton)

But the activists have made clear that until Obama addresses the subject, they will make Hillary Clinton a target. Bill Clinton’s words focused the issue squarely back on Obama.

The former president also suggested that different advertising strategies, such as a national campaign on specific issues including student loans, may have helped Democrats on the margins in the midterms but “would not have changed the outcome.”

“There are a lot of things that we need to know that we don’t about the difference between people who decide in the last week and people who got their mind made up early,” he said, citing Colorado as a state where he had felt Democratic Sen. Mark Udall, who lost, was doing well the whole time.

He also had advice for Obama on how to handle the final two years of his term: Don’t act like a lame duck.

“I think that he should minimize the chances of being a lame duck, which he can do by continuing to have an agenda and using the budget process to make deals with Republicans,” Clinton said, adding that since the GOP holds both houses of Congress “they have a much more vested interested in not just being” against everything.

“All they’ve done is do to him in six years what they did to me in four,” the former president said. Obama should “see if he can pass immigration reform … tax reform” and also keep working as hard as possible.

More than anything, he said, Obama should enjoy the job.

“That’s my only real advice,” Clinton said. “It needs to be fun. It’s a great honor to go to work in the White House. It’s crazy to say you’re a lame duck and waste a single day of that precious time.”

Obama has often been described by his critics as seeming weary in the job. But Clinton argued that in his administration everyone worked up until the last minute before leaving.

Earlier, he described in detail his jobs record as president, saying he inherited a weak economy and that it was worth pursuing initiatives such as welfare reform.

“We didn’t pretend that complex things were simple,” he said, describing how “deeply ingrained” trickle-down economics were when he came into the White House. One of his goals, he said was to “re-legitimize government.”

“This shows the importance of policy — we can do this again,” he said.

Defending Bill Clinton’s economic approach — which Hillary Clinton often refers to in her speeches — was a central theme of the weekend in Little Rock, where hundreds of former White House aides, campaign workers and extended Arkansas friends and family flocked to celebrate the Clinton era.

Among the other questions Bill Clinton answered at the POLITICO event was what’s on his “bucket list.”

It included riding in the desert on a horse to the spot where Genghis Khan is believed to be buried, traveling to Namibia, where his daughter, Chelsea, went on her honeymoon, and seeing the snows on Mount Kilimanjaro before they disappear.