I have an nostalgia for the Clinton years — years which I was not lucid enough to experience — precisely because I was forced to inhabit the Bush years. At least the yearning I have for the Blair premiership is somewhat rational. In any case, I suppose I was predisposed to enjoy Bubba’s return to the DNC, but in an address which included multiple ad-libs and lasted nearly 45 minutes, Clinton made the case for Obama’s first four years and the next four too in a way in which Obama has absolutely failed to do. I would advise reading the text of the speech yourself. He touched on energy, education, the national debt, taxes — he went the whole nine yards for Barack Obama. The crowd were enlivened by his conclusion, I love our country – and I know we’re coming back. For more than 200 years, through every crisis, we’ve always come out stronger than we went in. And we will again as long as we do it together. We champion the cause for which our founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor – to form a more perfect union. If that’s what you believe, if that’s what you want, we have to re-elect President Barack Obama.
The Republican Party made a huge mistake when they took on Elizabeth Warren. If she’d been made head of the Consumer Protection Bureau they might never have heard from her again. As it is, Warren is running for the Senate and brought down the house before President Clinton with that line, No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die. …We don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people. Provided she can refine her message on the stump, and doesn’t fall into the ‘You didn’t build that’ trap, she will be a tremendous asset for the Democratic Party for years to come.
I would question the decision to put Sandra Fluke in the primetime hour, particularly at the front of it. She was obviously very popular with the delegates in the hall, and her cause is a worthy and important one particularly given the ongoing war on women and their health choices. But she’s evidently a polarising figure and more fodder for the base than the country at-large. And, does the Democratic Party really wished to be defined by Sandra Fluke? Still, she’s more exciting than Chris van Hollen, I suppose.
