Laura Bush calls Hillary Clinton “out of bounds”

TURIN, Italy (Reuters) – U.S. first lady Laura Bush called
New York Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton “out of bounds”
on Saturday for a recent attack on her husband, U.S. President
George W. Bush, but chalked it up to politics.

Sen. Clinton, pondering a run for the Democratic
presidential nomination in 2008, has begun to intensify her
criticism of the Bush administration, recently saying it could
go down in history as among the worst ever.

“Of course I think it’s out of bounds,” Mrs. Bush told ABC
News from Turin, where she attended opening events at the
Winter Olympics. “But I think it’s politics, it’s certainly
politics.”

The Bush and Clinton families have a complicated
relationship. President Bush and his father, the former
president, both Republicans, get on well with former President
Bill Clinton, a Democrat, but the Bush family does not want to
see Clinton’s wife, the former first lady, win the presidency
in 2008.

A rich political tapestry was evident at the funeral last
week in Atlanta for Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil
rights leader Martin Luther King, with the Bush and Clinton
families gathered along with former President Jimmy Carter.

At that event, former President Clinton gave a hint of his
thinking about who should win in 2008. He noted that former
presidents were present, as was the current president, and then
he gestured to his wife to suggest she was the future
president.

Mrs. Bush said the two Bush presidents and Clinton “are in
a club together and really I think wives of the presidents are
in a club, as well.”

“We know what it’s like to live in that house. We certainly
know what it’s like to have your husband criticized. So I think
there’s a certain empathy that we might have for each other
that we wouldn’t have maybe for somebody else who said
something like that,” she said.

In an example of the way Republicans are dealing with Sen.
Clinton’s attacks, Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican
National Committee, has said Sen. Clinton’s attack was an
example of anger and that Americans do not like to elect angry
candidates.

(POLITICS-BUSH; Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Eric
Beech; Americas Desk, 202-898-8457)