Former President Bill Clinton complimented Arizona Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake’s looks while describing Vice President Kamala Harris as “extremely vulnerable” during campaign stops in the swing state Wednesday.
Clinton, 78, was commenting on the race between Lake and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) – comparing it to Harris’ contest against former President Donald Trump – when he made the bizarre remark.
“This is like a beautiful microcosm of the campaign that Kamala Harris is running for president,” Clinton said.
“You got a person [Gallego] that grew up under sometimes challenging circumstances, who made something of his life, running against someone [Lake] who is physically attractive but believes that politics is a performance art,” the 42nd president added.
Clinton then compared Lake to Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance – arguing that both are submissive to Trump – but made an unfortunate stumble over the word “prostrate.”
“Like JD Vance, she has to be prostrate before the master,” Clinton said.
Lake, a 55-year-old former television news anchor, responded to Clinton’s “compliment” at a rally on Thursday with a reference to the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.
“He said I was physically attractive. I woke up to this news this morning,” Lake said.
“As a middle-aged woman, I’m flattered. I’m flattered, OK?” she added. “I don’t get those kind of compliments every day. Two, I thought I was a little too old for him. Doesn’t he like interns?”
Meanwhile, at a different Harris campaign event in the Grand Canyon State, Clinton argued that GOP attacks against the vice president have left her “extremely vulnerable.”
The former president explained that there is only “a sliver” of voters that have yet to make up their minds about which presidential candidate to support, “and what they think of [Harris] largely depends on what they think of President Biden.”
“But she is extremely vulnerable,” Clinton said. “More vulnerable than she deserves to be, through crazy attacks.
“So, they’ve been thinking – the Republicans – all this time, how can we go on the attack?”
The latest RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Harris trailing Trump in Arizona by 1.5 percentage points – while Gallego holds a 6-point advantage over Lake.
There are 11 Electoral College votes up for grabs in the swing state, which began early voting on Oct. 9.
Arizonans have backed a Democrat for president just twice since 1952 — 1996, when Clinton won a second term, and 2020, when Joe Biden knocked off Trump.