WASHINGTON (AP) — Long regarded as having one of the shrewdest political minds among recent presidents, Bill Clinton has at times angered and alienated Democrats and Republicans alike while campaigning for his wife, Hillary Clinton.

His apparently spur-of-the moment decision to chat this week with Attorney General Loretta Lynch even as her agency is overseeing a sensitive investigation of his wife’s use of a private email server as secretary of state was only the latest in a series of loose-cannon episodes.

In 2008:

—In remarks that struck some as racial politics, Bill Clinton equated Barack Obama’s win in the South Carolina Democratic primary in January 2008 with Jesse Jackson’s victories in the state in 1984 and 1988. He touched off a furor about whether he was diminishing Obama’s achievement in a state where African-Americans make up a significant bloc of the Democratic electorate by citing past victories by another black candidate.

—Days before the New Hampshire primary, Bill Clinton infuriated some Democrats when he dismissed Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war. “Give me a break,” Clinton said. “This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” As a New York senator, Hillary Clinton voted to give President George W. Bush the authority to use military force, an issue that dogged her through the campaign…. read more here