Bill Clinton says President Barack Obama should have focused on raising the U.S. debt ceiling and came up with a better national campaign message during the midterm elections of 2010, the former president writes in his book released Tuesday, "Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy."
During Obama’s first two years in office, when Democrats still held the majority in Congress, and devised a more effective midterm campaign message, The Washington Post reported.
In regards to the party’s losses in 2010, "the Democrats did not counter the national Republican message with one of their own," Clinton writes. "There was no national advertising campaign to explain and defend what they had done and to compare their agenda for the next two years with the GOP proposals."
In addition, Clinton says Obama's criticism of Wall Street was counterproductive, explaining how executives would be willing to contribute to helping the economy and lowering the debt.
"Many of them supported me when I raised their taxes in 1993, because I didn't attack them for their success," Clinton writes in the book,
Clinton expresses his disapproval of Republican ideas such as privatizing Medicare and Medicaid and GOP tax cuts, saying the "anti-government ideology" is the reason for the nation’s struggling economy and high rate of unemployment.
"The anti-government movement's most cherished conviction is that we can't raise taxes on the 'job creators,'" Clinton writes. "We tried it their way for twenty of the last thirty years, and their strategy of using blanket tax cuts for high-income individuals didn't work."
