Bill Clinton does support Barack Obama for president. Honestly. Truly.
The former president returned to the Yale Law School for his 35th reunion Saturday, drawing more than 2,000 alumni, faculty, students and other invited guests to Woolsey Hall. He spoke eloquently about the current issues of the day: the disastrous economic crisis, deregulation, energy, global issues and why he likes to praise Republican presidential candidate John McCain even as he has officially endorsed fellow Democrat Barack Obama.
Clinton returned to New Haven without his wife, Hillary. She was out campaigning for Barack Obama. She, too, is a member of the class of ’73. When told of where she was and why, the audience applauded wildly.
The former president spoke without notes for 40 minutes at Saturday’s gathering as the audience snapped photos through cell phones. The lone political question came from members of the class of 1958 who had returned to New Haven to celebrate their 50th reunion.
“Why do you support Obama and consistently praise McCain?” asked Dean Harold Koh on behalf of the class.
That question has emerged in this fall’s campaign because Clinton has effusively praised McCain — at times more than he has praised Obama, who beat Clinton’s wife in a hard-fought Democratic primary campaign earlier this year. (Click here and here to read about why Clinton said he called McCain“great” while avoiding using the word to describe Obama.)
Clinton said that in general “bad mouthing a candidate is a poisonous thing” and if you are asking undecided voters to endorse Obama then “you need to give them a way to hear your arguments.”
He said his praise of McCain was genuine. “I don’t say anything I don’t believe.” He went on to describe the hazards of the polarized political climate in which the nation now finds itself.
“I think it’s crazy for us to believe we have to hate people we don’t want to vote for,” said Clinton, who played a different role in this Democratic primaries earlier this year, when he regularly criticized Obama on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “This idea that we have to bad-mouth people — it is a poisonous thing. It stops you from thinking. The same thing could be said for the attack dogs.”
As the presidential campaign enters the stretch, Clinton raised the issue of the undecided voter.
First he noted that Obama had attracted a “huge swath of young people” and that “he has raised an unprecedented amount of money.” Then he said all the people who are working hard for the candidate must “work like crazy to register as many people as they can. “
Since the Democratic voters almost evenly split their votes between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, he noted, “you have got to get a certain amount of the voters for Hillary [those not yet committed to Obama] to come to your side.
“If you lead off by bad-mouthing other people, those people cannot hear what you have to say.” He said ways must be found to give undecided voters “a way to hear your arguments… If you say what you like and you don’t like, people will listen to that.
“So you want to energize your supporters and register them and then you want everyone else to listen to you. What you need is certain number of them and then you have an unassailable majority. So that is why I am for Obama.
“And as I said about [GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah] Palin a week ago, I think it is unseemly for a former president to trash the people running for office.” This last remark elicited wild applause.
Clinton said the Yale Law School prepared him for life as a public official because it taught him respect for gathering evidence and mounting an argument.
Clinton was asked about the qualities he would look for in appointing a Supreme Court justice when he was a student and now. He said he would have been deeply concerned about a candidate’s civil rights back in the 1970s. Now “I would be looking for people who were super sensitive to preserving the framework of the Constitution.” He discussed illegal wiretapping by the Bush administration and said: “You can’t throw out the courts. I never felt unduly restrained,” he said.
Before he left the stage he looked at the young law students in the room. “My advice to anybody in the room is that you should do what makes you happy,” the former president said. “Life is short. It has been my experience that good things do happen if you do something that helps other people… People like to do what they are good at. It is good to wake up in the morning liking what you are doing.”
Dean Koh told a few vignettes of Clinton’s interchanges with several of his professors, including Robert Bork. But the tale that drew the most spontaneous reaction was how Bill met Hillary.
Clinton was in the school library with a classmate, who was urging Bill to try out for the Yale Law Journal. “But his eyes wandered when he saw another student who is now the U.S. Senator from New York. He tried to get to know her,” Koh said. “So he accompanied her to the registrar’s office to join a long line of students there to sign up for next term’s classes. He was glad the line was long so he and Hillary Rodham could talk ‘til they got to the front of the line. And when they got to the front, the registrar said, ‘Bill, what are you doing back here? You already registered!’” The audience burst into laughter.
Afterwards Clinton met with a half-dozen of his old classmates in Koh’s office. What was supposed to be a brief gathering turned into a schmooze-fest that lasted for hours.
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Bill Clinton's reluctance to convincingly praise Obama stems from what I think is his absolute inability to "pass the torch."
He had a troubled presidency, no doubt, but was adored by the dems overall. He being the last adored dem in power, and having a huge ego, it has not been shocking to me that he has had such trouble taking the emphasis off himself, even when he was campaigning for his wife. He's been a real turn off to me for several months of this campaign. My hope is that people will not care what he thinks too much.
"I don't say anything I don't believe."
yeah, right.