The nominating speech by Bill Clinton, I think it will go down in history as one of the great political speeches of the past 100 years. Congratulations Mr. Clinton, and thank you. But, don't take Esco's word for it, here's Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker:
(from The New Yorker) :
Born to Run: Hendrik Hertzberg on Bill Clinton’s speech at the D.N.C.:
http://nyr.kr/Nf7uLq(Source: newyorker.com)
"In its intensity, in the palpable love between performer and audience, in its passion, in its earnestness, in its straightforwardness—in its politics, even!—this was the rhetorical equivalent of a Bruce Springsteen concert."
Clinton’s speech—which, especially if President Obama is reëlected, will be remembered as one of the greatest tours de force in convention history.
Clinton’s speech unfolded like a symphony in three movements—or, better, a jazz oratorio. He started with a summary that combined homespun values with to-the-point numbers:
You see, we believe that “we’re all in this together” is a far better philosophy than “you’re on your own.” [Cheers, applause.] It is. So who’s right? [Cheers.] Well, since 1961, for fifty-two years now, the Republicans have held the White House twenty-eight years, the Democrats, twenty-four. In those fifty-two years, our private economy has produced sixty-six million private sector jobs.
Q.E.D.
Clinton mounted a brilliant defense of Obama’s tropism for coöperation, citing the bipartisanship of his own post-Presidential work, mentioning that Obama’s cabinet appointees included people who had opposed his nomination (“He even appointed Hillary!”), and contrasting Obama’s openness (and past Republican practice) with the nihilism and hatefulness of “the far right that now controls their party.” And then this:
In Tampa, the Republican argument against the President’s reëlection was actually pretty simple—pretty snappy. It went something like this: We left him a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough. So fire him and put us back in. [Laughter, applause.]
***
Now, I like—I like—I like the argument for President Obama’s reëlection a lot better. Here it is. He inherited a deeply damaged economy. He put a floor under the crash. He began the long, hard road to recovery and laid the foundation for a modern, more well-balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses, and lots of new wealth for innovators. [Cheers, applause.]
***
Folks, whether the American people believe what I just said or not may be the whole election. I just want you to know that I believe it. With all my heart, I believe it. [Cheers, applause.] Now, why do I believe it?
I’m fixing to tell you why.
That was the overture. Next, the symphony. Shaping his arguments with those big hands as well as that hoarse voice, Clinton defended Obama’s economic record and eviscerated virtually every Republican critique of that record, one by one, issue by issue: jobs and unemployment; the auto bailout; energy policy; health care; the deficit and the debt. He explained in patient detail why Republican accusations that Obama has weakened Medicare and gutted welfare-to-work requirements are “just not true.”
Does that sound dull? Well, it wasn’t. The audience in the hall was enthralled, and so were “the folks at home.” My home, anyway. [And mine]
Partly, I think, we were enthralled because he was enthralled. There was a script on the teleprompter, but wasn’t “reading” it; he was improvising on it in a, yes, disciplined way, the way a jazz soloist improvises on a familiar melody. [see below] His repeated admonitions—“Listen to this,” “Listen to this, everybody,” “Listen to me, now,” “Are you listening in Michigan and Ohio?,” “Now, finally, listen,” “Y’all you all got to listen carefully to this, this is really important”—came across not as hectoring but as breathless invitations, as if he was about to confide a particularly choice morsel of gossip. Each time he swivelled to a new issue—“Now, let’s talk about the debt”—you had the very opposite of a sinking sensation. You had a small thrill of delicious anticipation. O.K., let’s see how he puts this one away.
Fifty minutes? When Bill Clinton was President, he delivered nine State of the Union addresses. The first one clocked in at over an hour, and so did all eight of the rest. (Of the previous twenty-eight S.O.U.’s, just one—L.B.J.’s in 1967—had exceeded the sixty-minute mark.) The first couple of times Clinton did this, post-speech pundits opined that he’d gone on way too long, that he’d buried the audience’s patience under an avalanche of numbing detail. Polls and focus groups showed that the folks at home did not agree. They liked the length and they liked the detail.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2012/09/bill-clinton-dnc-speech-born-to-run.html#ixzz25qwGhJfS
(from The New Yorker )
September 7, 2012
Conversations With a Teleprompter
A lot of successful politicians, like George W. Bush and Barack Obama, are talented at reading from a Teleprompter. But Bill Clinton—as the comparison between his Democratic Convention remarks as prepared and as delivered proves—doesn’t read from a Teleprompter: he converses with it. He talks back when it has omitted a crucial detail; he one-ups it when its rhetorical flourish is insufficient.
Part of the reason he talks back so much (nearly doubling the initial length of his speech, in this case) is that he likes the sound of his own voice. But there is something else: Clinton is such a master of rhetorical strategy—he commands such innate and reflexive mastery of what makes the spoken word resonate—that he cannot help but improve his speech as he gives it. He doesn’t ad lib in the sense that extras in a movie have a restaurant conversation. He improvises, in the sense that Miles Davis or
Beethoven would come up with an enduring work of art on the spot. The Teleprompter has plenty of good detail, but Clinton’s brain is so densely pulsating with wonky elaboration that a few more bleed their way into the speech. (Health-care costs went up at “three times the rate of inflation for a decade”; in 2009, the G.D.P. shrank at an annualized nine per cent; excursions on interest rates and bipartisan coöperation in municipal government.)
The Teleprompter, well stocked by professionals, has a nice colloquial rhythm. But Clinton is such a natural at connecting with an audience that the folksy flourishes he adds are no match for the machine’s. (“You all got to listen carefully to this”; “It’s a real doozy”; “Did y’all watch their convention? I did”; “It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did.”) When he puts in little asides—the “wait a minute”s and the “listen”s and the “honestly, let’s just think about it”s—he is evincing more than tics: he is deploying a sly strategy, giving off the slight illusion that the whole speech is extemporaneous.
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Sometimes the Teleprompter is moving too rapidly for him, taking the dangerous risk that some passing nuance might not fully sink in to every head in the audience. So he slows the action and, at a critical juncture, makes it resonate with the audience by inserting a seemingly extraneous question and answer. “Why? Because” is his favorite way of seguing from point to point. The Teleprompter’s “which means” becomes Clinton’s “Now what does this mean? Think of it. It means…” The Teleprompter’s “coöperation works better; after all, nobody’s right all the time” becomes his “now why is this true? Why does coöperation work better than constant conflict? Because nobody’s right all the time.”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/09/bill-clinton-conversations-with-a-teleprompter.html#ixzz25qs0874d