One of the ironies of Bill Clinton's rousing oratory to the Democratic convention last night was the song played as he waved to the crowd before his speech kept repeating the strains, "yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone" from Fleetwood Mac's Don't Stop.
The song was used as the theme song of Clinton's first presidential campaign, but is now a reminder of the relevance of his presidency to Obama's.
Yesterday is gone and Bill Clinton is yesterday's man. Clinton is a great speaker and a President fondly remembered as governing during one of America's strongest economies in a period that reaped the benefits of Ronald Reagan's victory but had not yet suffered the travails of 9-11. It's sometimes thought that one of the reasons Al Gore lost to George W Bush was because Clinton was kept under wraps during the Gore presidential campaign. Whether it was because the former Vice President did not want to be outshone by his old boss, or the wounds from the Monica Lewinsky scandal were too fresh, it turned out to be a big mistake. Al Gore's stiff personality, without the boost from the personable, warm Clinton kept him from getting into the big chair in the Oval Office.
Barack Obama knows better and Clinton turned in a typical Clinton performance, eloquent, intelligent, emotionally stirring, and about twenty-five minutes too long to hold everyone's complete attention.
|The former President's heart seemed strangely not entirely in his performance. Probably because he didn't believe all of his finely crafted speech. At one point, Clinton said, "though I often disagreed with Republicans, I never learned to hate them the way the far-right, that now controls their party, seems to hate our President."
If that level of anger is mystifying to Clinton, perhaps we wan't paying any attention to what Democrats were saying in the eight years after he left office. The hatred and invective by them, that still continues, against George W. Bush is staggering by any standard. Leftist Democrats continue to utter Bush's name as if it were a swear word.
But one doesn't listen to Slick Willie for 100% accuracy, one listens to him to hear a good talk. He may have re-written the history of his own presidency through the lens of nostalgia and Obama's through salesmanship, but in the speechifying department, he certainly delivered the goods.
EYE ON A CRAZY PLANET
If you think, Clinton was a great President because of Reagan, you are smoking too much crap and obviously you don't know anything about the great U.S.A.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't think Clinton reaped benefits from Reagan's policies which eventually won the Cold War, then you don't know much about history or economics.
ReplyDeleteSooooo, let's see, Clinton was able to balance the budget because Reagan was in the illegal ARMS business.
ReplyDeleteYes genius, that`s right, and nothing at all to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union
ReplyDeleteThank you, I am a genius. I'm glad you can recognize one. Your implications are that Clinton's success was due to Reagan which is incorrect. His success was based on the fact that he actually knew how to run a country unlike the Jack Asses of the Republican Party! Who by the way could care less about the people.
ReplyDeleteClinton only appeared to balance the budget. In fact, Clinton initiated a multi-trillion dollar social entitlement program with the objective of buying houses for millions of Americans who could not afford to buy houses. However, rather than financing this expenditure directly, Clinton (and his associates) induced the financial system to finance the program with what later became known as “toxic mortgages.” This invention of an “off-income statement” expenditure is actually quite brilliant, and there is a certain irony in that banks used off-balance sheet assets to finance the government’s off-income statement expenditures.
ReplyDeleteI do not think that Clinton knew quite how far this thing would snowball. But there is no doubt that his administration started the ball rolling and continued giving it hefty shoves down the hill while it gathered size and momentum to the point at which it became impossible to stop.
The conclusion is that, like almost everything else about slick Willie, his balancing of the budget was an illusion. And, as a corollary, while it may be true Obama that is not solely responsible for the housing crisis that his administration inherited, he most definitely shares in the culpability. Obama was heavily involved in pursuing this atrocity along with his community organizing friends at ACORN. Obama in particular was suing banks for basing their lending policies on the financial condition of the borrower instead of his skin color. Once a race-huckster, always a race-huckster.
Hmmmm, interesting, not! The housing crisis happened due to DEREGULATION at the hands of the Republican administration not the opportunities that the Democrats created.
ReplyDelete