To Democrats fretting that Barack Obama isn't running away with the election, former President Bill Clinton has a message: Chill out, the race was always going to be close.

"I think, first of all, presidential elections, a lot of voting is cultural and identity-based," he said in an interview to air tonight on CNN's "Larry King Live." If you go back through the whole 20th century, we've only had one landslide elections, Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, where both candidates didn't get at least 39 or 40 percent of the vote. That is, the typical race was 40-40, 20 percent could go either way. Then you got to the 1968 election and all of those upheavals 40 years ago. And after that, the Republican base got to be about 45 percent, ours was about 40 percent.

"That's why it was so hard for Democrats to win the White House for a long time. Sometime in my second term it started evening up. And then we had a couple of races where the bases were about 45 and 45.
If you go into a race where you're going to get 45 percent of the vote, then those races are going to look close until the end," he added.

"But what I've always thought would happen here is that because of the condition of the economy, because of the demographics of America growing more diverse, younger, more open to the diversity of the Democratic Party, and because Senator Obama is, I think, not only charismatic, but really smart and a very disciplined candidate who has handled himself, I think, by and large remarkably well, I've always thought that in the end he would come out ahead. ..."

(Boston.com)