Lindsey Graham Mocks Clinton: Listening Tour "About As Scripted As...North Korea"

"You can't pick who you want to talk to. This is an unsustainable model, and to say it's a listening tour is sort of a joke."

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina mocked Hillary Clinton's recent visit to Iowa as "about as, you know, scripted as if it came out of North Korea." Graham was speaking with Boston Herald Radio Friday when he made the comments.

Likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton embarked on a two-day "listening tour" across Iowa after announcing her presidential bid last week. When one of Graham's interviewers suggested that the "everyday voters" that Clinton encountered "are pretty much planted," Graham jumped at the opportunity to draw an unflattering comparison.

"Well, they call that North Korea," responded Graham. "You know, Kim Jong-Un, he meets people — 'everybody likes me,' he says. I mean, it really is ridiculous."

"I don't know how long you can keep this up," Graham continued. "[Y]ou're gonna have to, basically, get out in front of the voters. You can't pick who you want to talk to. This is an unsustainable model, and to say it's a listening tour is sort of a joke."

Graham, who is visiting early primary states as he considers a bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, was in New Hampshire for the First in the Nation Republican Leadership Summit.

Graham was also asked about the possibility that the large number of candidates seeking or likely to seek the Republican nomination -- 21, by some estimates -- would result in conservatives "splintering their votes," allowing a "somebody like a Jeb Bush" to get the nomination.

"Well, I think Jeb Bush is conservative," Graham replied. "I think everybody in the primary is far more conservative than Hillary Clinton."

"There'll be degrees of what you would call conservative," Graham continued, before taking a thinly-veiled shot at Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the fellow Republican he criticizes most frequently: "Libertarian is libertarian, not conservative. So there're gonna be different lanes in the primary, but Jeb Bush is plenty conservative. He was a good governor, and I think is a conservative guy."

Here's the audio:

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