Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (15 page)

“Just imagine if we had had a voice roll call vote, as the White House operative wanted me to do it. We’d have lost. My proudest moment of the three days of the convention was that vote. I am staunchly pro-Israel and a defender of the Jewish state. I was proud to bang the gavel on ‘God’ and ‘Jerusalem.’”

Nonetheless, Obama did not thank Villaraigoa.

“Villaraigosa got zero gratitude from the president,” said a source who was backstage with the two men. “Obama and his people are the most disloyal people in politics. It’s all a one-way street with them. They’re all little people in the Obama White House.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“YOU CAN’T GET HIM OFF THE STAGE”

F
or some people, Bill Clinton’s public performances brought to mind John F. Kennedy’s cool, stylish press conferences. Others compared him to Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator.

But actually, Clinton’s strengths lay elsewhere.

His speeches weren’t speeches in the traditional sense; they were more like seductive schmoozefests. With his hoarse Southern drawl, rambling style, and intuitive understanding of his audience’s hopes and fears, he created an atmosphere of intimacy, which enabled him to connect on a visceral level with his listeners.

“Clinton’s powers of empathy are incredible,” says Dick Morris. “I have watched him give speeches and marveled at his ability to study the faces of the audience and react to them while
he is speaking. He reads them, and they understand that he does. This extraordinary responsiveness sometimes seems to sharpen his thinking, allowing him to conceive and express ideas he had never really fixed on before the speech.”

Though it might sound odd to mention Clinton and the existentialist philosopher Martin Buber in the same sentence, it was nonetheless true that Clinton achieved in his speeches what Buber called an “I-Thou” relationship—a bond of unity, mutuality, and reciprocity with his audience. He generally avoided Oprah-like schmaltz and made each listener feel as though he were relating directly to him or her.

And this night he was prepared to give the I-Thou speech of his life.

Clinton sauntered onto the stage of the Time Warner Cable Arena at 10:40 PM, clapping his large, expressive hands to the sounds of his theme song, Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop,” and making direct eye contact with members of the Illinois delegation, who were seated closest to the rostrum. When the twenty thousand delegates and guests sprawled over the convention hall caught sight of Clinton’s white cotton-candy hair on the giant Jumbotron screen above the speaker’s platform, they went wild, standing and cheering themselves hoarse.

He wore a navy blue suit, a red and blue necktie done up in a double Windsor knot, and enough makeup to hide the perennially red tip of his nose. He had put on a few pounds so
that he wouldn’t appear cadaverous under the unforgiving glare of the television lights. He looked rested (even though he had had only a few hours of shut-eye) and relaxed (even though his adrenal glands were pumping overtime). He moved slowly, like an older man, the old tribal leader who had come to impart his wisdom. But at the same time, he did not look weighed down by the daunting task of persuading 25 million TV viewers across 7 networks to follow his advice and vote for a president who had been unable to make good on most of his promises.

Just a couple of hours earlier, Clinton had finally delivered the text of his speech to the Obamans. David Axelrod, along with David Plouffe and Jonathan Favreau, Obama’s chief speechwriter, edited it for length, trimming more than 2,000 words so that it clocked in at 3,279 words, which they calculated would translate into about twenty-eight minutes of TV airtime. They then sent off the edited speech to be uploaded onto the teleprompter.

Clinton had a long and ambivalent history with the teleprompter. Unlike Barack Obama, whose best speeches were read word for word from the teleprompter and who often appeared tongue-tied without this crutch, Clinton wasn’t slavishly chained to the electronic display device. For instance, during a speech he gave to a joint session of Congress in 1993, an aide mistakenly loaded the teleprompter with an outdated text of Clinton’s address, and yet Clinton managed to ad-lib from memory the correct speech, which included complex details of his healthcare plan, until the teleprompter was fixed.

“Now, Mr. Mayor, fellow Democrats, we are here to nominate a president. And I’ve got one in mind,” Clinton began to riotous cheers and rapturous applause from the crowd in Charlotte. “I want to nominate a man whose own life has known its fair share of adversity and uncertainty. . . . I want to nominate a man who’s cool on the outside [
cheers and applause
], but who burns for America on the inside [
cheers and applause
]. . . . I want Barack Obama to be the next president of the United States [
cheers and applause
]. And I proudly nominate him to be the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party.”

The old schmoozemeister was in great form. And with each rhetorical trope (“It’s a real doozy” . . . “Did y’all watch their convention?
I
did” . . . “Honestly, let’s just think about it” . . .), his speech grew and grew until it was nearly 80 percent longer—2,609 words longer, to be precise—than the 3,279 words authorized by David Axelrod. Clinton had memorized almost all of the words that had been cut from his original text by Axelrod, Plouffe, and Favreau, and he was able to call them back to mind on the fly and insert them—and a lot of other words as well—into his speech exactly where they belonged.

And so Clinton went on and on and on, passing his allotted twenty-eight minutes, passing beyond television’s 11:00 witching hour, when TV network producers had to decide whether to cut away from the convention to local news or stay with Clinton. All of them stayed with Clinton. By the time he came
to his concluding thoughts, he was pushing fifty minutes—and he was still ignoring the teleprompter and improvising.

“People have predicted our demise ever since George Washington was criticized for being a mediocre surveyor with a bad set of wooden false teeth,” Clinton said. “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 reelect President Barack Obama.”

The mainstream media was left spellbound.

As far as the liberal pundits were concerned, Clinton had delivered his best speech since leaving the White House, and he had told the Obama story better than Obama ever did. They were particularly wonderstruck by Clinton’s masterful theatricality.

“Clinton was clearly having a blast in Charlotte,” wrote John F. Harris and Jonathan Martin in Politico—“smiling, clapping, claiming that Republicans were living in ‘an alternate universe,’ and spinning off cracker-barrel lines like veteran Democrat Bob Strauss’s quip that ‘every politician wants every voter to believe he was born in a log cabin that he built himself.’”

The writer Tom Junod gave the speech the New Journalism treatment in a blog post for
Esquire
:

          
Bill Clinton used a teleprompter for his speech on Wednesday night. He didn’t use it like the parade of other speakers used it, however. . . . No, he used it as John Coltrane used the chords of “My Favorite Things”—as a point of departure, and as an excuse for a show of virtuosity. The teleprompter at the Time Warner Cable Arena here is a big black box set in the middle of the delegate floor, about 50 feet or so from the stage; it rolls the script in white type against a black background, with a little white arrow indicating what lines the speaker is speaking. The arrow turns red when the speaker stops, or strays from the text, and one of the pleasures of watching Bill Clinton deliver his speech nominating Barack Obama as the Democratic Party’s candidate for president was listening to what he said when the teleprompter itself seemed confused—when the script stopped rolling, and the arrow started flashing red.

              
He made the comment about Paul Ryan’s brass—“it takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did”—when the arrow was red. He also made the joke about George Washington’s wooden teeth. The arrow was red almost every time he addressed the crowd directly, almost every time he said something like, “Y’all need to listen carefully to this because it’s really
important,” or “Now you’re having a good time, but it’s time to get serious.” A simple line of script, such as “my fellow Americans,” would become “my fellow Americans, all of you in this great hall and all of you watching at home”—it would be amplified, elongated, exaggerated and it would once again remind you that the first talent Bill Clinton revealed was for playing the saxophone.

The hosannas, however, were by and large for Clinton’s style rather than for his substance. Hardly any of the mainstream analysts mentioned the fact that Clinton presented an Obama who resembled the centrist Clinton more than he did the leftist occupant of the Oval Office. None of them laughed when Clinton ignored Obama’s dysfunctional relationship with the American business community and said, “We Democrats think the country works better with . . . business and government actually working together to promote growth and broadly shared prosperity.” None of them took exception when Clinton claimed that “I actually never learned to hate” Republicans, when in fact Clinton hated Republicans as much as Hillary did. None of them choked on Clinton’s words when he said that the superpartisan Obama was “committed to constructive cooperation” with Republicans, when in fact Obama had spent the past four years ignoring the Republicans in Congress and was, as a result, the most divisive president in recent history.

Instead, the focus of almost all of the media commentary was on Clinton’s oratory. Mallary Jean Tenore, managing editor of
the website for the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism school, wrote an analysis of Clinton’s use of Cicero’s “Canons of Rhetoric.” She called her piece “10 Rhetorical Strategies That Made Bill Clinton’s DNC Speech Effective,” and began by conceding: “While
Factcheck.org
called it ‘a fact-checker’s nightmare’ and others criticized it for being too long, there’s something about Clinton’s speech that made it stand out: good writing.”

Dashiell Bennett, senior writer of the Atlantic Wire (now The Wire), went Tenore one better. He re-created a copy of Clinton’s speech as it was provided to the media and then added Clinton’s off-the-cuff insertions in italics.

“If you were following any journalists on Twitter last night,” Bennett wrote, “one of the most remarked upon aspects of Bill Clinton’s nomination speech was how liberally he deviated from the prepared text. What was handed out to the media was four pages of single-spaced, small font text, but—as an exasperated TelePrompTer operator found out—that was really just a guideline to what Clinton actually wanted to say during his 49-minute address. We decided to compare the two versions to see how one of the great speechmakers of his era goes about his business.”