Joe Klein on Bill Clinton in the White House: "[T]here's a kind of, something that's spiritually skeevy about it"

During the January 28 edition of MSNBC Live, Time columnist Joe Klein discussed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-NY) presidential campaign and the possibility of the Clintons' return to the White House and said, "[T] the question of whether you want them back is -- it's not illegal, it's not unconstitutional, but there's a kind of, something that's spiritually skeevy about it, you know, having him [former President Bill Clinton] back in the White House."

From the 9 a.m. hour of the January 28 edition of MSNBC Live:

KLEIN: I think that what we're looking at here, if you step back just a bit, is that during the two weeks -- the past two weeks since New Hampshire -- Bill Clinton has redefined his wife's candidacy.

Up to that point, I thought she was doing pretty well. In fact, I thought she was handling [Sen. Barack] Obama [D-IL] very well in the debates all by herself. And when I thought about her as a candidate, I thought, "Well, she has a lot of really good substance, a lot of really good programs she's proposing. She's got a lot of experience in national security and foreign policy, which Obama doesn't," but that was -- but I was only thinking about her.

Now, when you think about her, you have to think about them. And the question of whether you want them back is -- it's not illegal, it's not unconstitutional, but there's a kind of, something that's spiritually skeevy about it, you know, having him back in the White House.

And I think that the Bill Clinton that we saw during the past week wasn't the Bill Clinton who everybody remembers as the first black president, to be sure, or a guy who did a pretty good job as president.

The Bill Clinton we saw last week was the guy who couldn't figure out what the definition of "is" is and who pardoned Mark Rich. He just seemed to be a pretty, you know, political, very political sort of politician.

—J.H.