Former President Clinton, stumping for his wife Hillary Clinton in Tennessee, contended that President Obama wasn’t “a change-maker.” Bill Clinton garnered quite a bit of media attention for stating that, “we are all mixed-race people” after Representative Steve Cohen introduced the forty-second president as a “heck of a stand-in” for the first black United States president, but his criticism of the President seems to have gone rather unnoticed.

Actress Meryl Streep also recently generated a media stir and criticism when stating that, “we’re all Africans, really,” while a part of an all-white film jury for the Berlin International Film Festival. Streep’s comments occurred after a general backlash against a lack of diversity in Hollywood, especially the recent Oscar nominations.

President Clinton’s comments come as Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton hopes to keep her polling lead among African-American voters as recent polling shows the anti-establishment Bernie Sanders gaining black voter support in the important South Carolina primary. Unfortunately for the Clintons, the comments by Bill opens up old wounds from Hillary’s bruising 2008 campaign against then-Senator Obama. From The Guardian:

“A lot of people say you don’t understand – it’s rigged now,” Clinton said. “Yeah, it’s rigged now because you don’t have a president that’s a change-maker.”

Clinton’s comments on race left open to question whether the former president, who has often been referred to as America’s first black president and who refers to himself as a “stand-in for the first black president”, is coming uncomfortably close to comments he made in 2008, in which he described Obama’s image in the media as a “fairytale”. That generated outrage among African Americans.

A book about that campaign, Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, claimed that Clinton told Senator Ted Kennedy during an appeal for his support that a few years before, Obama “would have been carrying our bags”.

It seems rather reckless for Bill Clinton to disparage President Obama at this point of the campaign, just as his wife is looking to tie her campaign to the Obama Administration. Also, the claim just seems rather false on its face and has some commentators wondering if the former President is a liability on the campaign trail to his former First Lady, instead of her “secret weapon” as she has claimed in the past.

Not only is President Obama “a change-maker” simply for becoming the first African American voted to lead the free world, but he has made significant changes to our healthcare and criminal justice systems. While many progressives and civil libertarians wish President Obama were more bold on ending cannabis prohibition, his administration’s policy to allow states to move forward with regulated marijuana programs have been a tremendous change for the better than previous administrations, including President Bill Clinton’s.

Despite a huge head-start in name recognition, polling numbers, funding and establishment support, the Hillary Clinton campaign seems to be making several unforced errors, allowing Bernie Sanders to remarkably pull off a virtual tie in Iowa, win a landslide in New Hampshire, poll even in Nevada and greatly close the gap in national polls.

Once sought as inevitable, former Secretary of State Clinton’s campaign has been rife with missteps: from her inability to adequately deal with top-secret emails discovered on her private email server; attending a luxurious gala fundraiser with an investment bank a few days before the Iowa Caucus; the unwillingness to release her transcripts from her $225,000 speeches to Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs; and clinging to the controversial legacy of Nixon Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Hillary Clinton certainly doesn’t need any more controversially comments from her husband adding fuel to the momentum of the Bernie Sanders campaign.