Carter Wrenn posted on September 06, 2012 15:04
Gary, I’m guessing you slept very well last night and woke up this morning with a smile on your face. If I had a lick of sense I’d hang out a sign today that says “Gone Fishing” instead of writing about Bill Clinton’s speech but I promised so here goes.
The good news, from where I sit, is one speech can’t decide the election. The bad news is one speech can be a wind change – and Bill Clinton gave such a humdinger of a speech he had me thinking I ought to be for Obama-care and that Republicans can’t add 2 + 2.
More seriously, since January voters have formed a picture of what has happened to them over the last four years and of Obama and Mitt Romney. Last night, Bill Clinton offered them a completely different way to interpret the picture. For instance he said, No one could have repaired the damage he (Obama) found four years ago – then set out to prove it, in detail, and along the way rebutted the Republicans’ attacks on Obama on workfare, on Medicare, on unemployment.
The moment he was done, thinking, With all those statistics that speech must have been packed full of half-truths, I clicked over to Fox News to watch the ‘fact-checkers’ whip out the long knives and see the “fair and balanced” commentators chop Clinton to shreds. I heard:
The speech was defensive – backwards looking.
People will get lost in the details.
The speech was sprawling, undisciplined, self-indulgent.
It was a policy work seminar.
Well, Obama’s no Clinton.
And finally, Clinton’s speech was too long – people turned off the TV set at eleven o’clock.
Let’s hope so.
Because not one commentator cited a fact Clinton got wrong.
As I said, Bubba’s speech didn’t elect Barack Obama, but Bill Clinton did hand Obama a road map to get elected and what happens next depends on whether Barack Obama knows a good thing when he sees it: Whether he returns to the Obama campaign’s ‘politics as usual’ or changes course to follow Clinton’s roadmap.
If he does, Mitt Romney is going to need a new road map too.