President Clinton DID THAT! Highlights from His Convention Speech
If you missed President Clinton’s EPIC speech last night at the Democratic National Convention, do yourself a favor and watch it in full below!
I like my political speeches like I like my sermons: humble, honest and to the point. President Clinton’s speech was that and more. From a writer’s perspective, this speech is a dream: it’s inspiring, engaging and informative. From a political standpoint, this speech was the homerun straight to the independents that the Democratic party needed to score with a victory lap for the base.
Humility is a big pill to swallow for most people. President Clinton –who is not by any means BFF’s with President Obama — took his medicine with grace. In a primetime speech at the DNC where Clinton could have made the speech all about him and talked extensively about how successful his own presidency was, he put himself and his own ego on the back-burner and touted every major accomplishment of the Obama presidency. Recognizing that his very presence in the prime-time slot at the convention was enough to remind voters of his successful presidency (where was Bush during the RNC last week? Exactly where the RNC wanted him, in TEXAS) Clinton stayed on message that President Obama was and is and should be the guy for the job of keeping America on the right track. I was up and ready to go door-to-door canvassing for the President as soon as the speech was over! President Clinton did his job and he did it with the class and humility:
President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did. No president- not me or any of my predecessors could have repaired all the damage in just four years. But conditions are improving and if you’ll renew the President’s contract you will feel it.
I believe that with all my heart.
On Welfare: Let’s look at the other big charge the Republicans made. It’s a real doozy. (Laughter.) They actually have charged and run ads saying that President Obama wants to weaken the work requirements in the welfare reform bill I signed that moved millions of people from welfare to work. (Jeers.) Wait, you need to know, here’s what happened. (Laughter.) Nobody ever tells you what really happened — here’s what happened.
When some Republican governors asked if they could have waivers to try new ways to put people on welfare back to work, the Obama administration listened because we all know it’s hard for even people with good work histories to get jobs today. So moving folks from welfare to work is a real challenge.
And the administration agreed to give waivers to those governors and others only if they had a credible plan to increase employment by 20 percent, and they could keep the waivers only if they did increase employment. Now, did I make myself clear? The requirement was for more work, not less. (Cheers, applause.)
On health care:
First, individuals and businesses have already gotten more than a billion dollars in refunds from insurance companies because the new law requires 80 to 85 percent of your premium to go to your health care, not profits or promotion. And the gains are even greater than that because a bunch of insurance companies have applied to lower their rates to comply with the requirement.
Second, more than 3 million young people between 19 and 25 are insured for the first time because their parents’ policies can cover them.
Millions of seniors are receiving preventive care, all the way from breast cancer screenings to tests for heart problems and scores of other things. And younger people are getting them, too.
Fourth, soon the insurance companies — not the government, the insurance companies — will have millions of new customers, many of them middle-class people with pre-existing conditions who never could get insurance before.
Now, finally, listen to this. For the last two years — after going up at three times the rate of inflation for a decade, for the last two years health care costs have been under 4 percent in both years for the first time in 50 years. (Cheers, applause.)
So let me ask you something. Are we better off because President Obama fought for health care reform? (Cheers, applause.) You bet we are.
On Medicare: so President Obama and the Democrats didn’t weaken Medicare; they strengthened Medicare. 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 — (laughter) — because that $716 billion is exactly, to the dollar, the same amount of Medicare savings that he has in his own budget. (Cheers, applause.) You got to get one thing — it takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did. (Laughter, cheers, applause.) (emphasis added)
On the debt:
Now, what has the president done? He has offered a reasonable plan of $4 trillion in debt reduction over a decade, with 2 1/2 trillion (dollars) coming from — for every $2 1/2 trillion in spending cuts, he raises a dollar in new revenues — 2 1/2-to-1. And he has tight controls on future spending. That’s the kind of balanced approach proposed by the Simpson-Bowles Commission, a bipartisan commission.
Now, I think this plan is way better than Governor Romney’s plan. First, the Romney plan failed the first test of fiscal responsibility. The numbers just don’t add up. (Laughter, applause.)
I mean, consider this. What would you do if you had this problem? Somebody says, oh, we’ve got a big debt problem. We’ve got to reduce the debt. So what’s the first thing you say we’re going to do? Well, to reduce the debt, we’re going to have another $5 trillion in tax cuts heavily weighted to upper-income people. So we’ll make the debt hole bigger before we start to get out of it.
Now, when you say, what are you going to do about this $5 trillion you just added on? They say, oh, we’ll make it up by eliminating loopholes in the tax code.
So then you ask, well, which loopholes, and how much?
You know what they say? See me about that after the election. (Laughter.)
I’m not making it up. That’s their position. See me about that after the election. (Really, he’s not making that up. Read it for yourself here.)
More facts about the economy:
In 2010, as the president’s recovery program kicked in, the job losses stopped and things began to turn around.
The Recovery Act saved and created millions of jobs and cut taxes for 95 percent of the American people. In the last 29 months the economy has produced about 4.5 million private sector jobs. But last year, the Republicans blocked the president’s jobs plan costing the economy more than a million new jobs. So here’s another jobs score: President Obama plus 4.5 million, congressional Republicans zero.
Over that same period, more than more than 500,000 manufacturing jobs have been created under President Obama- the first time manufacturing jobs have increased since the 1990s.
The auto industry restructuring worked. It saved more than a million jobs, not just at GM, Chrysler and their dealerships, but in auto parts manufacturing all over the country. That’s why even auto-makers that weren’t part of the deal supported it. They needed to save the suppliers too. Like I said, we’re all in this together.
Now there are 250,000 more people working in the auto industry than the day the companies were restructured. Gov. Romney opposed the plan to save GM and Chrysler. So here’s another jobs score: Obama 250,000, Romney, zero.
These numbers don’t lie.
Finally, President Clinton’s speech got to the heart of the issues in this campaign. Not only did he call the Republicans out for their blatant and brazen lies in this campaign and their overall unwillingness to cooperate and compromise with the President, he got to the very root of the lies and attacks on the President: the Republicans’ uncloaked hatred for the leader of our nation. They want the President to fail so badly, even if it means taking down the entire country. By their own admission, it’s their number 1 priority. So the point that President Clinton drove home to us all is that we have a crystal clear choice in this election of what kind of country we want to live in and what kind of people we want to be:
My fellow Americans, you have to decide what kind of country you want to live in. If you want a you’re on your own, winner take all society you should support the Republican ticket. If you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibilities- a “we’re all in it together” society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. If you want every American to vote and you think it’s wrong to change voting procedures just to reduce the turnout of younger, poorer, minority and disabled voters, you should support Barack Obama. If you think the president was right to open the doors of American opportunity to young immigrants brought here as children who want to go to college or serve in the military, you should vote for Barack Obama. If you want a future of shared prosperity, where the middle class is growing and poverty is declining, where the American Dream is alive and well, and where the United States remains the leading force for peace and prosperity in a highly competitive world, you should vote for Barack Obama. … 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.