Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (60 page)

In late July, Obama had called Clinton to ask him to deliver the nominating speech, a prime-time rebuttal to the Republicans who questioned their alliance. The aura of cooperation could scarcely have differed more from the frozen atmosphere four years earlier, when the Clinton camp barely acknowledged requests from the Obama team to see his convention speech.

This time the line of communication with Cooper was open, with Axelrod and communications director Stephanie Cutter providing guidance, which was welcomed, during the weeks leading up to the convention. Obama himself had assured Clinton, “We will give you whatever you need.” Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, who had held the same job in Clinton’s White House, soon started to send memos with fresh economic data.

According to the framework suggested by Axelrod and Cutter, Clinton was to make the case explaining why the economy had not grown faster, the reasons behind Obama’s actions as president, and the argument for the country to stick with him, despite dissatisfaction with the lagging recovery—and all while drawing contrasts with the Republicans.

What they proposed made sense to Clinton and to Cooper, who assisted with the speech, and to his other advisers. But it was only the barest outline. Paul Begala began to work on a draft toward the end of August, with help from Bruce Reed, another domestic policy adviser in Obama’s White House who had once worked for Clinton.

Finally, over Labor Day weekend, just two days before the convention, Clinton sat down in Chappaqua with a lined white pad and pen. “I’m working on it,” he told anyone who asked, but not much was on paper by Tuesday morning. Around noon, Clinton got on a chartered Gulfstream IV jet at Westchester Airport to fly down to the convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Clinton was in a good mood, but pensive. About an hour into the flight, he started handing pages of cryptic handwriting to Cooper to type into his laptop. By the time they landed, the speech had just begun to take shape. On the twentieth floor of the Hilton Center City downtown, he sat at a dining room table, still writing longhand pages. Around 5 p.m., they took a break to attend a party thrown by Arkansas governor Mike Beebe, but he was preoccupied with the speech and passed on a second party that evening at the home of Erskine Bowles, one of his oldest friends.

He went back to the hotel room where he skipped dinner, snacking on a bowl of hummus and sipping coffee as he continued working until almost 2 a.m. Through the evening he had dispatched questions to Reed and Sperling via Cooper’s email. While the text had gained struc
ture during the night, it had also gained a lot of words—and would need to be cut nearly in half for his twenty-five-minute time slot.

On Wednesday morning he had breakfast in the hotel room, then got on the phone with Cutter and Axelrod at around 9 a.m. to discuss a television appearance later in the day. He gave them a preview of the speech and, while they liked what they heard, they frankly worried about the amount of factual data piled into the text. Begala, John Podesta, and former White House press secretary Joe Lockhart turned up in the suite. They were soon sitting around the dining table with printouts, adding lines. Around noon, Sperling showed up, then Reed, and later still, former presidential assistant and journalist Sidney Blumenthal and Mark Penn.

By then the text was complete, yet still too long, and everyone in the room began to discuss how best to state the essential facts. But the speech still had no ending—and while they had cut it down to twenty-eight minutes, Clinton kept adding back material that had come out. At 5 p.m., they sent excerpts of the speech out for distribution to the political reporters, then broke at 7:30 to shower and change. Cooper sent a draft to Sperling’s staff for a swift fact-checking.

Obama’s staff showed him the speech, and he approved, asking only that Clinton strengthen a certain sentence defending his record on welfare, which the Republicans had attacked.

A teleprompter and podium sat in a room down the hallway from Clinton so that he could practice. He hadn’t used a teleprompter in years, but as his aides, old staffers, and Chelsea watched him rehearsing, it was, as one later put it, “a wow moment.” And he had hit the mark in twenty minutes.

Cooper printed it out in a thirty-point font—as Clinton liked to say, quoting George Washington, he had gone blind in the service of his country—and handed off a thumb drive for the prompter in the convention hall at 9:50 p.m.

The convention schedule was running behind, so there was no way Clinton would finish his speech until after 11 p.m. But they were confident that the networks would continue to broadcast him, no matter how late the speech went. For an introduction, the Obama campaign had produced a video about him, the foundation, and his post-presidency. As the lights came up, he strode out into the spotlight and
stood behind the big wooden lectern, wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and striped tie, to the strains of that old Fleetwood Mac tune.

When the delegates finally stopped cheering, it was 10:35. “Fellow Democrats,” he began, “we are here to nominate a president. And, I’ve got one in mind. . . . I want to nominate a man who ran for president to change the course of an already weak economy and then just six weeks before his election, saw it suffer the biggest collapse since the Great Depression; a man who stopped the slide into depression and put us on the long road to recovery, knowing all the while that no matter how many jobs that he saved or created, there’d still be millions more waiting, worried about feeding their own kids, trying to keep their hopes alive.

“I want to nominate a man who’s cool on the outside—but who burns for America on the inside. I want—I want a man who believes with no doubt that we can build a new American Dream economy, driven by innovation and creativity, through education and—yes—by cooperation.

“And by the way, after last night, I want a man who had the good sense to marry Michelle Obama.”

In short, Bill killed it. He brought to bear the full weight of his political experience and forensic skill on behalf of the man who was once his sworn adversary. This was among Clinton’s finest campaign speeches, presenting an exhaustive argument for Obama—and against the Republicans.

With professorial flair, he delivered a lesson in presidential economics, acknowledging complexity while keeping the lesson understandable and even simple. No political leader since FDR had developed Clinton’s capacity to perform such rhetorical magic. He possessed a singular authority to discuss employment, spending, and debt, having proved his GOP opponents wrong so comprehensively in the past that they had started citing him as a model.

To call Clinton out that way—as both Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, had done—had been a woeful mistake. He merrily repaid the cynical compliment by “scoring” them and their party on budgetary arithmetic and job creation, an exercise from which they did not emerge unscathed.

Republicans have ruled the country for more presidential terms than Democrats over the past fifty-three years, Clinton recalled, but
they have overseen the creation of only 24 million jobs, compared with 42 million credited to Democrats. He then praised Obama for enabling creation of 250,000 new jobs in the restored auto industry and castigated Romney for advising Bush to bankrupt the industry, which would have created “zero” jobs (and probably would have caused the loss of millions).

The “country boy from Arkansas” did the sums that exposed the Ryan budget as a hoax, doling out tax breaks to billionaires that would supposedly be offset by reforms—which they promised to detail “after the election.”

On both welfare reform and the expansion of health care for poor children, he was passionate and highly articulate, explaining “what really happened” with the welfare work requirement that Republicans had accused Obama of gutting—and how Ryan and Romney planned to hit Medicare with the same level of cuts that he accused them of wrongly attributing to Obama.

Obama had added eight years to the Medicare system’s solvency, he said. “Now, when Congressman Ryan looked into that TV camera and attacked President Obama’s Medicare savings as, quote, the biggest, coldest power play, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry”—the audience laughed—“because that $716 billion is exactly, to the dollar, the same amount of Medicare savings that he has in his own budget!

“You got to give him one thing,” he said to roaring cheers, “it takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did.” As the cheers and applause went on, he wagged a finger. “Now, you’re having a good time, but this is getting serious, and I want you to listen.” He went on to explain, in detail, how the Republican plan “would end Medicare as we know it.”

Finished with his dismantling of the GOP program, he vindicated the president’s economic record in a way that neither Obama nor his campaign could do without sounding defensive. “President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did. Listen to me, now. No president—no president, not me, not any of my predecessors, no one could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years.”

He mockingly summarized other party’s case: “In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president’s re-election was pretty sim
ple: We left him a total mess, he hasn’t finished cleaning it up yet, so fire him and put us back in.” Instead, he said with the authority vested in him by his enduring popularity, Obama had earned another term by saving the country from depression and laying the foundation for renewed prosperity.

Finally, he described America’s moral foundation, as a nation where “we are all in this together,” a society that had grown strong because the benefits of growth and innovation were shared broadly. What Democrats believe to be morally decent, he said, is also economically sound.

Even as he excoriated the Republicans, Clinton contrived to seize the high ground, saying he had never learned to hate them the way they seemed to hate Obama (and once hated him, too). Republican presidents had done too many good things, from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s interstate highway system to Bush’s PEPFAR spending, to pretend that they were all bad. He was very proud, he said, to have worked with Bush’s father on Katrina and tsunami relief; in his foundation work, he didn’t bother looking at who belonged to which party, because they were all too busy getting things done.

Cooperation, even with people whose views are disagreeable, was the way forward for the country, he said—and the president had persisted in trying to work with his opponents, even when all they wanted to do was defeat him.

It was a very long speech, almost fifty minutes, but spellbinding as Clinton put forward a defense in detail of everything significant the president had achieved, from the auto bailout and green energy to Obamacare. From memory, he had restored about two thousand words cut from the first draft. He could feel the audience with him at every word and went on.

“Are we better off today than four years ago?” he demanded, again and again. The answer was always yes.

For the ending, he cribbed directly from the conclusion of
Back to Work
.

“Look, I love our country so much. And I know we’re coming back. For more than 200 years, through every crisis, we’ve always come back. People have predicted our demise ever since George Washington was criticized for being a mediocre surveyor with a bad set of wooden false teeth. And so far, every single person that’s bet against America has lost
money, because we always come back. We come through every fire a little stronger and a little better.

“And we do it because in the end we decide to champion the cause for which our founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor—the cause of forming a more perfect union. My fellow Americans, if that is what you want, if that is what you believe, you must vote and you must re-elect President Barack Obama. God bless you and God bless America.”

Backstage, the Obamas greeted him warmly. Among the aides who had worked on the speech until the final moments, there was a palpable feeling of relief. But it was less a climactic moment than an opening salvo. Clinton would return to the campaign trail, aiming to make Romney and Ryan regret they had ever mentioned his name.

During the weeks leading up to Election Day, the race between Obama and Romney felt tighter than the results proved to be, partly because the Republicans and their media outlets insisted that polls showing the Democrat leading were “skewed,” and partly because the economic fundamentals pointed toward a Republican victory. But those polls showed unmistakably that the Democratic convention—and in particular, Clinton’s masterful speech—had lifted the party’s ticket beyond reach of their opponents.

The campaign kept his face before the public in television and online advertising, such as an ad that kept running in some states for weeks after the convention. Touting Obama’s investments in education, job training, and manufacturing innovation, he looked straight at camera and said: “It only works if there is a strong middle class. That’s what happened when I was president. We need to keep going with his plan.”

The strategy for surrogate Clinton was simple: Persuade white working-class voters in battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania to stay with Obama. No other surrogate had the credibility to reach those voters, which meant that the former president spent day after day in October flying into Scranton, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, sometimes driving at breakneck speed behind a police convoy from one platform to another.

Frenetic as the end of a campaign invariably is, Clinton was having fun. If anyone expressed surprise to see him campaigning so hard for Obama, he would laugh and say, “I might be the only person in this country who is happier to vote for Obama this year than in 2008,” then explain that the president had proved himself during the past four years in ways that Clinton had not expected. It wasn’t a line he used often on the stump, where he reprised the themes of the convention speech on the economy, student loans, health care, and, depending on where he happened to be, a strong emphasis on the auto bailout.