Former President Bill Clinton is paying the price for speaking without maximum precision.

So is the presidential campaign of his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The 42nd president, while speaking on his wife’s behalf, asserted it is imperative that voters erase what he called the “awful legacy” of the past eight years.

That’s it. Awful legacy. He didn’t identify whose legacy to which he was referring.

Pundits, politicians and just plain folks were left, therefore, to presume he meant the president’s “awful legacy.”

The borrow a term: Oops!

The Hillary Clinton campaign immediately sought to clarify what he meant, which was the legacy of the Republican-controlled Congress that, according to the campaign, has obstructed President Obama at every turn along the way.

OK, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t say “Congress’s awful legacy.” Then again, neither did he say “Barack Obama’s awful legacy.”

However, since the president is the Main Man in any political discussion, we are left to presume the former president was talking about his successor.

Right?

President Clinton, of course, has gotten into this kind of word-parsing mess before.

Recall his grand jury testimony during the Lewinsky Scandal when he sought to tell the panel, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” That verbal miscue has become embedded in U.S. political lexicon.

I doubt this one will endure quite as long.

Still, for a seasoned politician — which Bill Clinton certainly is — to speak so imprecisely in the heat of a critical campaign really does make some of us wonder: What in the world did he really say — or mean?

Perhaps he can blame it on jet lag.