Bill Clinton Hopes Hillary's Emotional Reading of Victory Speech 'Will Make People a Little Less Cynical'
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Bill Clinton believes "one of the most profound mistakes we ever made" as a country was not electing his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, president of the United States in 2016.
In an interview with PEOPLE ahead of the release of President Bill Clinton Teaches Inclusive Leadership, which launched Thursday on MasterClass, the former president said Sec. Clinton was "the most qualified person to run for office in my lifetime, including me."
In her own recent course on the power of resilience for MasterClass, Ms. Clinton read portions of a victory speech she hoped to give in 2016 but never did because of her defeat at the hands of Donald Trump.
Looking back, the former president said Sec. Clinton's qualifications worked against her in the race because her opponent and his supporters were "busy discrediting all institutions."
"Being well-qualified is a bad thing, having done things in the jobs you had before, including the magnificent job she did as a Senator for New York, it didn't count for anything, because the whole system was messed up," President Clinton told PEOPLE.
He went on to say that fixation on "the email thing" during the campaign was "ridiculous," referring to persistent implications, allegations and investigations of a private email server Sec. Clinton used during her time at the State Department. Clinton apologized for mishandling emails and cooperated with an investigation that ended without charges.
"I never thought there was anything to it and sure enough, there wasn't, and even a conservative Republican U.S. attorney appointed by Bill Barr under President Trump said there wasn't," Clinton said.
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He also told the story of an encounter he called "the most disappointing thing that happened to me personally when I was campaigning for Hillary in 2016."
While taking selfies with his wife's supporters, a young man approached and made accusations against the Clintons. The president said the claims were unfair and explained why but found it hard to discuss matters of substance with the man who approached him at the campaign event.
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"When you form these fixed views that are divorced from facts, it didn't work," he said, using it as an example of how his qualified wife's historic candidacy could be reduced to a single issue like her emails.
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"It's just easier if you can turn a three-dimensional human being into a two-dimensional cartoon," he said. "But it's not what life's about. Life's about filling out figures, not shrinking them."
By reading her deeply personal speech, Clinton said his wife is coloring in the lines of her life, her contributions and who she is as a person. "I hope and I think she hopes that it will make people a little less cynical about who people are and what they can do," he said.
It's a topic the former president touches on in his own MasterClass course on leadership, which includes a lesson he said he learned from Nelson Mandela, who went from prison for anti-apartheid activism to becoming South Africa's first Black president, on finding opportunities to work with those who oppose you for the sake of a better future.
"The grief he took from his own supporters for putting his adversaries in his cabinet," was worth it, Clinton said, "because he was thinking about the future."
"He was saying, 'We just got to vote for the first time in 300 years, and there's nothing we can run on our own. We have to reach out to these people and give them a chance to be a part of our common future, because we need their help to run the schools, the banks, the military, you name it, every institution in society,' " Clinton said. "And he understood that."
