Bill Clinton predicts Obama will win bid for second term, lauds his economic policies

Former President Bill Clinton on the cover of Esquire.

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President Barack Obama will be in New York on Thursday.

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Bubba is banking on President Obama getting reelected in November.

“I think Barack Obama will be the next President,” Bill Clinton says without hesitation in a new Esquire interview. “I think he will win.”

Americans may be impatient with the pace of the recovery from the Great Recession, but “they will conclude that it takes a long time to get out of the kind of economic distress were were in,” Clinton said.

The public understands Obama inherited an economic meltdown from George W. Bush and that the Republicans are offering more of the same failed policies, Clinton said.

Voters also understand that Obama’s “policies are more likely to move us out of that than if they give the White House and the Congress to a party that will give them more of what they just had,” Clinton said.

Also, Obama can point to his rescue of the U.S. auto industry and “he’s going to have a very strong national-security record to run on,” said Clinton. “So he won’t be vulnerable there.”

In the interview, Clinton also said the Republican Party that Obama has had to contend is different from the one he he grappled with during his two terms.

“We’re living in a time when the Republicans have only pushed harder and harder to the right,” he said.

Clinton said this has even affected his one-time nemesis, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is now running for President and closing in on GOP front-runner Mitt Romney.

“As a private citizen, he was for certain important health-care reforms and believed in climate change,” Clinton said of the Georgia Republican. “And now he’s just like Romney. Neither one of them can say what they believe to be true and get nominated.”

“Romney’s still trying to figure out what he did as governor of Massachusetts and still appeal” to the hard right in the GOP, Clinton said.

Surprisingly, given how the GOP pushed hard for his impeachment, Clinton said, “I liked working with Republicans.”

Clinton also praised current House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, as a man with “good sense.”

The former President’s rosy reelection prediction was music to the ears of Obama, who was back in the Big Apple on Thursday for a trio of star-studded campaign fund-raisers.

The commander in chief’s first stop is the lavish Upper East Side restaurant Daniel, where he will break bread with Jewish leader paying $15,000 per plate for the privilege.

Next, Obama will attend dinner at director Spike Lee's brownstone on 63rd St. It’s a small gathering of just about 40 people, but tickets start at a whopping $38,500 per person.

Obama winds up his day with a stop at the historic Apollo theater in Harlem, where singers Al Green and India.Arie will perform. Tickets for that event start at $100 per person and soar to $25,000.

The President could encounter some protesters as he heads uptown.

Obama’s pricey fund-raisers represent "a profound disconnect the sitting President has with poor and working class blacks that constitute his core base of support," said Nellie Bailey of Occupy Harlem.

Obama and the Democratic National Committee raised more than $220 million last year in preparation for the 2012 election.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/president-obama-york-city-hold-trio-fundraisers-2012-re-election-bid-article-1.1008607#ixzz1k07XOg00