Comeback Kid returns with lesson in inspiring the faithful

In nominating Barack Obama for president, Bill Clinton demolished the Republicans

IN A poignant lesson on the vicissitudes of political life, president Barack Obama walked on to the stage at the end of Bill Clinton’s speech on Wednesday night, executed a high five and embraced the former president like a brother. While Obama headed backstage, Clinton lingered moments longer, eager to glad-hand and soak up the glory.

The Comeback Kid was enjoying yet another resurrection. The whippersnapper who defeated Clinton’s wife in 2008 and shunned his advice after the Democrats’ “shellacking” in the 2010 mid-terms needed help, and Clinton loved it.

Clinton gave Obama something that is sorely lacking after nearly four difficult years in power: street cred. “I want to nominate a man cool on the outside but burning for America on the inside,” Clinton began. “A man who believes we can build a new American dream economy driven by innovation and creativity, education and co-operation. A man who had the good sense to marry Michelle Obama.”

Clinton portrayed Obama, 15 years his junior, as a president in his own image. One of the main reasons Obama should be re-elected, he insisted, “is he is still committed to constructive co operation”. Though he often disagreed with Republicans, Clinton said, “I never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate president Obama and the Democrats.”

For 48 minutes, more than twice the time allotted, the man known as the Democrats’ Big Dog lectured the party faithful, starting sentences with “Now listen to this” and “Look here”. By the time it was over, Clinton had demolished Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, with a smile.

At their convention last week, Clinton said, “the Republican argument against the president’s re-election was actually pretty simple: ‘We left him a total mess, he hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in.’”

“Listen to me,” Clinton continued. “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.” Republicans believe in a “you’re-on-your-own, winner-take-all society”, while Democrats prefer a “we’re-all-in-this-together society,” Clinton said.

“Who’s right?” he asked rhetorically, truffling his speech with dates, facts and figures. “Well, since 1961, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24. In those 52 years, our economy produced 66 million private-sector jobs. What’s the jobs score? Republicans 24 million; Democrats 42 million!”

If everyone in America had watched Clinton’s speech, the Democratic senator from New York Charles Schumer said, the election would be over tomorrow.

In the roaring 1990s, when Clinton was president, the internet boomed, the stock market tripled and unemployment fell from more than 7 per cent to less than 4 per cent. It hasn’t gone below 8 per cent under Obama, and eagerly awaited monthly jobs figures will today provide the coda to the convention.

Clinton said Obama’s policies are working but Americans just don’t feel it yet. “I had this same thing happen in 1994 and early ’95,” he explained reassuringly. By 1996, he added, the US was “halfway through the longest peacetime expansion in American history.”

Since Obama took office, the economy has produced about 4.5 million private-sector jobs, Clinton said: “President Obama – plus 4.5 million. Congressional Republicans – ze-ro.” Likewise, the auto industry bailout, which Romney opposed, produced a 250,000 “jobs score” for Obama, “ze-ro” for Romney.

Clinton’s 69 per cent popularity rating – equivalent to his wife Hillary’s – is some 18 points above Obama’s. Relations between the Clintons and Obamas have often been rocky but this summer it was Obama who sought out Clinton to ask him to deliver the nomination speech, a first for a former president.

In Tampa, the Republican vice- presidential nominee Paul Ryan said Obama was guilty of the “biggest, coldest power play” in cutting $716 billion from fees paid to providers of Medicare health insurance for senior citizens.

“I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Clinton said, because as House budget committee chair, Ryan had proposed the exact same cuts “to the dollar . . . It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did.”

The rapt ovations for Clinton did not mask a certain tension between his centrist, pro-business ideology and Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor and candidate for Teddy Kennedy’s old Senate seat. She spoke before Clinton, and represents the left wing of the party.

Last May, Clinton unsettled the Obama campaign by saying Romney had a “sterling” business record at Bain Capital. On Wednesday night, Warren accused Wall Street and corporate America of having “chipped, squeezed and hammered” the middle class.

“Mitt Romney wants to give billions in breaks to big corporations,” she said. “But he and Paul Ryan would pulverise financial reform, voucherise Medicare and vaporise Obamacare.”

Warren ridiculed Romney for having said corporations are people. “People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance,” Warren said. “They live, they love and they die. And that matters. That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations. We run it for people.”

Obama has zig-zagged between Clinton’s practice of conciliation and co-operation with Republicans and Warren’s belief that conservatives and big business must be confronted.

In a further example of his pliancy, Obama asked the party to reinstate language on Israel and God that figured in the 2008 platform but had been dropped from the 2012 platform.

The Romney campaign had claimed the omission of a sentence saying that Jerusalem “is and will remain” the capital of Israel constituted “a radical shift . . . away from Israel.” East Jerusalem has been occupied by Israel in violation of UN Security Council resolutions since 1967.

The former Democratic governor of Ohio Ted Strickland argued for the reinstatement of a phrase recognising the “God-given potential” of Americans, saying that as an ordained Methodist minister, “I am here to attest that our faith and belief in God is central to the American story and informs the values we’ve expressed in our party’s platform.” Some delegates booed, rose and shook their fingers at the convention chairman to protest the reinstatement of both passages.