Bill Clinton is in the Gym

Two weeks ago, I found myself standing within a hundred feet of Bill Clinton. We'd gone out to North Carolina to see High Point, the college my daughter had chosen to attend this fall. Her coach called while we were driving up from Georgia to let us know that Bill would be making a campaign appearance for Hillary at the school's student center the next morning. My wife and daughter are Hillary fans. They were excited. I was excited too.

I've only seen two presidents in person before. I had seen Richard Nixon in the midst of Watergate when he was in Houston, but I was two full balconies away. I'd also attended the second Clinton inauguration in 1997, but I was half a couple blocks away on Capitol square.

That evening, the president of my daughter's college was greeting folk at the student center, one of his habits. After introductions where he showed off a knack for remembering names and details about his students, I mentioned that he must be very excited to have a former President speak at the school. He informed me that they'd had Steve Forbes just last week, Rudy Giuliani was the commencement speaker last May, and Clarence Thomas was coming out to speak in another few weeks. I winced. It was apparent that he's not a fan of the Clintons. Who else would equate Steve Forbes to an appearance by Bill Clinton other than a hardcore Republican or maybe a libertarian? What was our daughter getting into at this place? Moments later, the college president explained that he believes in letting his students have contact with a range of speakers and ideas. When approached about the campaign stop, his only condition was that the students of the college be admitted free. That made me feel better, though he didn't exactly come up with a long list of progressive speakers he’d invited there. Clinton almost didn't count because the campaign had approached the school rather than vice versa. The next day the college president got several e-mails from donors threatening to stop giving simply because Bill Clinton was allowed on campus.

The student center there puts most resorts to shame. It has one of the nicest swimming pools I've seen, a hot tub, basketball courts, a running track, Starbucks, Subway, leather easy chairs, and two floors of state of the art exercise equipment including elliptical trainers with attached television screens. Oh yeah, it also houses the campus bookstore which is slightly bigger than the Starbucks but smaller than the exercise equipment area. One of the school’s guiding philosophies is “treat the students well” and they’ll treat others well after they graduate.

The next morning we made a point of getting to the student center forty five minutes before the doors opened so we could make sure we could get in. While the line was long, it wasn't an overflow crowd. Bill Clinton drew about two thirds capacity for a gym that the fire marshal designated for fifteen hundred people. Bill was fifteen minutes late. He was making 7 stops in North Carolina in one day. I expected his speech to be about ten to fifteen minutes. He spoke for more than an hour.

The guy's hair is now very white. There was a hospital gurney with an oxygen tank at the ready just behind the podium, but there were no overt signs of security. He talked for a bit about North Carolina basketball then jumped into his four reasons people should vote for Hillary after a joke or two. It wound up being about twelve reasons to vote for Hillary.

There's no doubt that Bill Clinton has a gift for connecting to people. He largely talks policy and throws out numbers and names with remarkable facility even though he didn't appear to be using notes of any kind. One of the impressive things about the in person Clinton is that he knows how to make things easy to relate to. He'll stop at just the right moment in talking about the cost of extracting energy from the ground and drop in something like “that means you'd be doing the equivalent of taking forty thousand cars off the road if we could do this”. He went on about “green collar” workers who would turn cleaning up the environment and warding off global warming into a NAFTA proof industry that would have to keep jobs at home. He talked about the mortgage crisis and talked about Hillary's proposal as a way to bail out families not banks.

He managed not to mention that his administration was behind NAFTA and the deregulation of the banking industry. In fact, this was the fascinating thing to me. The former President came off as one of Hillary's biggest assets and also one of her biggest liabilities. Notably, the entourage of Democratic endorsers he brought along on the stop were minor North Carolina political figures. There was a former attorney general, a county commissioner, a former assistant secretary of something or other. There was, however no John or Elizabeth Edwards for instance or Jim Hunt.

Hillary and Bill clearly share a passion for policy. Listening to either of them. You hear a command of detail, nuance, and execution that other politicians rarely manage. In particular, Bill does it in a way that makes his conclusions feel strangely inevitable and universally appealing, e.g. If we add 5,000 policemen and firemen to America, that's better for everyone. He's very good at making the concerns of government basic and seemingly straightforward. He even managed to make Iraq sound strangely uncontroversial “Yes, we need to get out, but we have to get out responsibly.”

He then went on to describe Hillary’s quite detailed exit strategy along with her plan to forgive student loans for college graduates who go into the helping professions.

My wife was thrilled. The crowd was politely enthusiastic. They listened, applauded at the right times, but they didn't get visibly charged up. Volunteers circulated the audience trying to coax more students to commit to the campaign and I didn't see anyone pick up a pencil. Of course, this is a school that invited Rudy Giuliani to do commencement. Bill drew about six hundred people that morning, Hillary drew a thousand a few miles away, and Obama drew two thousand.

Bill Clinton is not the candidate this time around. Hillary is. Still this felt like part of the way people should make up their minds about a President. It makes a difference to see someone directly (in person if possible), listen to them for an hour without commentators, edits, or sound bytes. While positions matter, the ability to articulate them and present them effectively probably matters just as much.

The strange business of Obama’s “bitter” comments, Hillary’s “Bosnia” visit, and even McCain’s recent inability to tell the difference between Sunnis and Shiites has turned running for the presidency into a game of “gotcha”. In thousands of words spoken in public, you say something the wrong way once and that’s supposed to be fatal, yet what you have to say the other 99% of the time somehow doesn’t matter according to the headlines. It’s simply no way to pick a leader.

I don’t know that I’ll ever have a chance to see a president up close again. It felt like I had an opportunity to make up my own mind about Bill Clinton and to a certain extent Hillary. I actually voted for the guy twice during the nineties. Oddly, I’ve voted in dozens of elections and not had this sort of opportunity before. There’s something wrong with that. Yes, I’ve been lazy in many instances, but I’ve spent more time buying and shopping for cars than I have shopped and test-driven (maybe wrong word with Bill) a presidential candidate. That’s not good.
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