Donald Lambro

The White House declined comment, but it's clear that Obama's advisers and campaign strategists considered his remarks "off message." Nameless officials "pointed out that Obama has said repeatedly that he would not extend the Bush tax cuts for higher earners," the Washington Post reported.

But it seemed clear the president's advisers were not happy about his unsolicited advice and communicated that to Clinton's office. Not long after his interview, the former president's spokesman Matt McKenna released a brief statement explaining his remarks, but not backing away from what he said.

"In the interview, he simply said that he doubted that a long-term agreement on spending cuts and revenues would be reached until after the election," the statement said.


Even so, the statement insisted Clinton believes "we're not in a recession, even though we'd all like [economic] growth to be higher."

Whether that soothed the White House remains unclear at this point, but feelings between Obama and Clinton have not exactly been warm and cozy for sometime now.

When Obama and his campaign high command were bashing his

Republican rival, Mitt Romney, on his record as a business turnaround investor at Bain Capital, Clinton went to Romney's defense.

He called Romney "a man who's been governor and had a sterling business career."

But these criticisms of Obama's political and policy strategies are not isolated instances.

In a book on economic policy that Clinton wrote last year, he didn't mince words about the Obama economy that was then in its third dismal year and barely growing at a feeble 1.7 percent. "We're in a mess now," Clinton wrote.

Even the book's title was a blunt rebuke of Obama's handling of the economy: "Back To Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy."

He seemed to be suggesting that in the third year of Obama's presidency, he still hadn't put the country back to work, that his economic policies were not smart, and that the economy was still weak.

What Clinton especially disliked was Obama's attacks on Wall Street executives and wealthy big business CEOs. "Many of them supported me when I raised their taxes in 1993, because I didn't attack them for their success," he wrote at the time.

And then there was this comment from the political master that had Obama's high command rolling their eyes: "It is heartening that people all over the world want to pursue their version of the American

Dream but troubling that others are doing a better job than we are of providing it to their people."

While Obama last year was still pursuing his ideological obsession to raise income taxes in a still-anemic, high unemployment economy, Clinton was publicly bashing that policy, too.

"I personally don't believe we ought to be raising taxes or

cutting spending, either one, until we get this economy off the ground," he said last fall in an interview with Newsmax.

Clinton still thinks, his latest statement notwithstanding, that the Obama economy still hasn't gotten off the ground and we're likely to hear more from him on that score in the weeks to come.

Donald Lambro

Donald Lambro is chief political correspondent for The Washington Times.