Bill Clinton: Obama will win, and I'm supporting him vigorously

To Democrats fretting that Barack Obama isn't running away with the election, former President Bill Clinton has a message: Chill out, the race was always going to be close.

"I think, first of all, presidential elections, a lot of voting is cultural and identity-based," he said in an interview to air tonight on CNN's "Larry King Live." If you go back through the whole 20th century, we've only had one landslide elections, Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, where both candidates didn't get at least 39 or 40 percent of the vote. That is, the typical race was 40-40, 20 percent could go either way. Then you got to the 1968 election and all of those upheavals 40 years ago. And after that, the Republican base got to be about 45 percent, ours was about 40 percent.

"That's why it was so hard for Democrats to win the White House for a long time. Sometime in my second term it started evening up. And then we had a couple of races where the bases were about 45 and 45.
If you go into a race where you're going to get 45 percent of the vote, then those races are going to look close until the end," he added.

"But what I've always thought would happen here is that because of the condition of the economy, because of the demographics of America growing more diverse, younger, more open to the diversity of the Democratic Party, and because Senator Obama is, I think, not only charismatic, but really smart and a very disciplined candidate who has handled himself, I think, by and large remarkably well, I've always thought that in the end he would come out ahead.

Clinton said while he's been busy lately working for his foundation in Africa, he's ready now to vigorously campaign for Obama. And he rejected criticism that he and his wife, Hillary Clinton, haven't campaigned for Obama forcefully enough.

"Well, if you look at the speech I gave in Denver and the speech Hillary gave, I think it would be hard to question the depth of our feeling and the fact that we gave good reasons for why we were supporting Senator Obama and Senator Biden.

"You know, I also would like to say that if you look at what Hillary has done, she has already done more for him, notwithstanding the unusual circumstances of this primary, than any runner up has in a nominating process in 40 years. I think you can argue that she has done more than all other runner-ups have in the Democratic Party in 40 years. We have been quite clear on this. We're not party-wreckers, and we believe that the country needs to take a different course.

"Now some of them, as we all know, are so enthralled, as all of our strongest supporters are, that they don't think you're for them unless you're dumping on somebody else. I personally think that is not a good strategy to win this election.

"That is, everybody wants Hillary or me or, for that matter, Senator Obama or Senator Biden just to say bad things about Senator McCain or Governor Palin. Those people are already for us.

"We've got to go get some votes here of people who voted for Hillary in the primary and are undecided, or people who didn't vote in the primary."