Former US president Bill Clinton seized the Democratic stage Saturday night, offering one of his strongest denunciations of US President George W. Bush since leaving office as he tried to rally Democrats here around candidates who have yet to stir the excitement he did in 1992.
Speaking without notes or a prepared text, Clinton invoked the circumstances of the 2000 presidential election as he argued that the Bush administration had squandered the domestic and foreign policy gains he had made in his eight years in office.
"That election was not a mandate for radical change, but that is what we got," Clinton said, adding,
"We went from surplus to deficit, from job gain to job loss, from a reduction in poverty to an increase in poverty, from a reduction in people without health insurance to an increase of people without health insurance," he added.
The former president said that Bush had wasted an opportunity to unite the country and enhance its international standing in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks. "Instead of uniting the world, we alienated it," he said. "And instead of uniting America, we divided it by trying to push it too far to the right."
The setting for Clinton's rare public speech on the American political scene was the annual steak fry held by the state's senior senator, Tom Harkin. It was attended by seven of the nine Democratic presidential candidates.
Six of them also spoke to the crowd on Saturday night, but Clinton's speech, even though it was arguably not one of his strongest performances, almost entirely obscured their words and served instead to underscore the contrast between the political skills of Clinton and those of this year's crop of candidates. Indeed, two of the best-known Democrats, Senator John Edwards and Senator John Kerry, left the stage about 15 minutes before Clinton arrived, citing scheduling conflicts.
Clinton seemed aware of the danger that his presence might overshadow the contenders for next year, or highlight their shortcomings, and he went to great lengths to dispute the notion that the Democrats were putting up a weak field this year. He went out of his way to praise eight of the nine candidates. (The Reverend Al Sharpton, who was not at the steak fry, was the only one not to receive any mention from Clinton.)
"I like this field -- I get tired of saying the field can't beat the incumbent president," said Clinton, adding: "When somebody tells you the people who are running for president aren't big, they just mean they aren't famous yet."
Clinton used his own economic situation to mock Bush's tax cut. Clinton said he might, as a very wealthy former president living in Chappaqua, New York, be paying more taxes than just about anyone else in America.
"I get my tax cut, and they are going to take 300,000 poor children and kick them out of after-school programs," he said.
The candidates and the host, Harkin, fell over one another to praise Clinton and dispel any idea that Clinton, who was impeached but not removed from office, was not welcome in Democratic circles. Harkin even praised Clinton for bringing rain to this drought-afflicted region, though the rain stopped the moment Clinton took the stage. And the audience was dotted with signs reading, "Welcome back, Bill," and "We Miss You."
"When you listen to Rush Limbaugh and all those right-wingers, you'd think that Bill Clinton was still in the White House," Harkin said, referring to the radio talk show host. "He still drives those right-wingers nuts, and that's another reason we love Bill Clinton."
Edwards, who has patterned his campaign after Clinton's 1992 race, even appropriating some of Clinton's language, said, "I am tired of Democrats walking away from Bill Clinton and Al Gore, who led the greatest period of economic growth in our country's history."
And Kerry, speaking before Clinton, took notice of the former president's propensity for lengthy speeches at public gatherings, a propensity that Kerry shares.
"I saw in the program that Bill Clinton is going to speak for about 20 minutes," he said. "And in that 20 minutes, if that's what you believe it is, he's going to deliver more common sense and more sense of the country than George Bush has in two and a half years."
Clinton, in fact, spoke for 22 minutes. His voice was hoarse and strained, and his speech wandered at times, as his crowd grew restless.
Wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots, and appearing thinner then he had at any point in the White House, Clinton took the stage to the sound of his 1992 campaign theme song, Don't Stop [Thinking about Tomorrow] by Fleetwood Mac. And when he was done, Clinton did as Clinton always does at these kinds of events: He stayed behind to shake every hand he could find, lingering for nearly an hour as the Iowa sky turned dark behind him.
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