Bill Clinton’s lengthy speech at the Democratic National Convention left no demographic without flattery, as he outlined his romance with Hillary. The potential First Man’s speech echoed many from the First Ladies – but with some glaring omissions.
First Lady speeches tend to follow a similar script: outline the wanna-be president as a family guy, present a practical problem that will appeal to Middle America ™ and a few anecdotes that try to sell the presidential candidate as being just like you!
The speech was historic – and not just in terms of its total run time. It was the first time a First Lady speech came from a man and a former president. It also glazed over some details that he probably does not want to talk about.
He did not touch on the years 2001 and 2003, when he was a big fan of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein – or at least of his private jet. Clinton reportedly ditched his Secret Service detail for at least five flights, even though there does not appear to be any of the paperwork required for signing the detail off.
Those facts must have been cut for time.
His speech began in 1971, when he met Hillary at Yale. He describes her as a girl with “big blond hair, big glasses, wore no makeup.” He then tells a tale of following her around campus, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. This is the exact behavior that seems cute in movies, but is usually creepy in real life.
He then walked the audience through his three attempts to get her to marry him, trying to get the audience to identify him as a spouse and not a former president. The last time he endorsed someone as a president, it didn’t end well. Ask Al Gore.
In fact, he did not discuss his own presidential terms at all. While briefly mentioning “Halloween parties in the neighborhood to a Viennese gala in the White House,” he kind of skimmed over some key points in the 1993 – 2001 range.
The happy marriage he presented might well sell to someone who doesn’t remember Monica Lewinsky. In 1998, news broke of an affair between Clinton and Lewinsky, who was then an intern at the White House. The two had “a mutual relationship,” to quote Lewinsky in Vanity Fair.
Many people on the internet felt that more attention should have been paid to the impeachment process which followed the revelation of the affair that nearly drove Lewinsky to suicide.
Despite the fact that the speech was meant to highlight Clinton, many on the internet wanted the 69-year-old to talk more about his sex life.
Clinton said of Hillary work in coal country, “She worked for farmers… for upstate cities in rural areas who needed more ideas and more new investment to create good jobs, something we have to do again in small-town and rural America, in neighborhoods that have been left behind in our cities and Indian country and, yes, in coal country.”
However, he did not mention that she once said she would, “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?”
Although she immediately followed that up with, “And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people,” and expressed gratitude towards miners, she caught a lot of flak for that statement.
He also said: “You could drop her into any trouble spot, pick one, come back in a month and somehow, some way she will have made it better. That is just who she is.” Unfortunately, Benghazi is not one of those places.
Attacks on consulates are nothing new. Thirteen were attacked during George W. Bush’s presidency, leaving 60 dead as a result. However, the failure to mention Benghazi probably did little to assuage anger from Republicans.