After Hillary's winning performance Tuesday night, and a sigh of relief from Obama rank-and-file, all attention shifted to Wednesday night's appearance by Pres. Clinton. What would Big Bill say?
Given that he's been famously terse about Obama since the primaries came to an end, his remarks were a wildcard. The day's theme was Securing America's Future, and for the most part, the Dems were on point. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Iraq War veteran Tammy Duckworth burnished the case, but CSM Michele S. Jones, the first female command sergeant major of the US Army, was electric; standing next to her, even Gen. Petraeus would look like Private Benjamin.
That said, apart from us C-Span junkies, most of America wasn't watching. Finally primetime arrived, and a restored Bill Clinton took the stage, looking better than he has in a decade. Is the public limelight his fountain of youth? Whatever Hillary left unsaid -- allowing the opposition to immediately exploit -- Bill explicitly and forcefully confronted. In what signaled the beginning of rhetorical attacks against the presumptive Republic nominee, Clinton said that on the two great issues of the day: Rebuilding the American Dream and Restoring America's Standing in the World that McCain was unprepared and that Obama was ready to lead. Typical of Clinton's expository, the speech was broad in scope, referencing the prosperity of the Clinton years and contrasting them with the Bush two terms. Most interestingly, is how Clinton faced down the #1 meme of the Republicans (right up there with "Obama the foreigner") that Obama was not ready to be Commander-in-Chief: by comparing Barack... to himself! Can a president have hubris? Consensus held that Bill made the journey and gave the Obama campaign everything they could have dreamt of in his remarks. Certainly, he's shown that hubris or not, he could defer to what was in the party's interests over his own.
The Most Improved Oratoraward goes to... Sen. John Kerry. The windsurfer gave the speech of his life. Not only was he unafraid to mince words - comparing John McCain the Maverick to John McCain the Candidate -- but he did so with a clarity I frankly did not know that he possessed. In contrasting McCain's positions on the Bush tax cut for the wealthy, immigration, and climate change, Kerry got to invoke the very line that sunk his presidential bid: "He was for it before he was against it." And, by golly, it WORKED. Kerry's introduction of Obama's great-uncle Charlie Payne, who helped liberate one of the concentration camps at Buchenwald in 1945, made tangible his remarks that no one party owns the concept of patriotism and that specifically, "No one can question Barack Obama's patriotism." Finally, the line that the American public requires "more than a good soldier, they require a wise leader," should be immediately adopted on the stump and in ads across the country. [The
One hundred years ago today President Lyndon Baines Johnson was born. In today's New York TimesRobert A. Caro reminds us how President Johnson played no small role in ushering in the civil rights era.