Slick Willie

Bill Clinton got the crowd going big-time.  He is, as Brit Hume noted, the most skilled politician of our time. Amazing how he picked example after example and passionately told the story, beat up on Republicans and Romney and had a crowd of Dems, who were just aching for someone to tell those dastardly Republicans off, wild with support.

 

If only his stories were true.  I caught myself thinking I could refute every one of them, yet you never meet someone so skilled at thumping the points and making a casual listener think he is the genius of all time.  How did Bill come upon this skill?  I remember hearing a psychologist telling about how kids who are abused by alcoholic/druiggie parents develop a survival skill of lying off the cuff and making it stick as a truth.  So when Dad comes home and tells you he is going to whup your ass for breaking his favorite lamp, you suddenly make up a story of some plausibility about how you were only trying to save grandma’s life when she started choking and mom was calling the ambulance and the lamp got knocked down.  Dad in his drunken stupdor will remember about grandma choking and the frantic household but doesn’t remember the doggone lamp.  But now the kid has an excuse which in dad’s foggy thinking, isn’t worth a beating after all.  But it takes more than a good story.  The kid has to deliver it with the passion and emotion of a revival preacher, so that dad thinks it must be right, else the kid wouldn’t be so intense.  Kid also has to be utterly sincere in his lie, so dad thinks the kid must be telling the truth.  That’s how Bill Clinton avoided the abuse of his violent alcoholic father.  Or as Rahm Emmanuel noted wryly, “He’s a particularly good liar.”

 

And so Bill told us in the speech about how Barack wanted to work across the aisle. Why look at what a bipartisan guy he is.  He chose a person who ran against him, Joe Biden, as Veep and Biden was the hero of Iraq in getting the war ended (You do remember hearing that, don't you!?) And then he chose Hillary as Sec. of State.  Why that proves what an aisle crosser Barack is!  He tried valiantly to get the Republicans to agree to $4 Trillion of debt reduction--$2.5T spending reductions and $1.5T taxes, a balanced approach—and those evil R’s wouldn’t do it.  Now wait.  I remember that $4T.  That was the Grand Bargain of July 2011.  They had a big meeting in the White House and it was announced that Obama and Boehner had agreed to the above-mentioned $4T and Boehner was going to propose it to the R’s.  That afternoon, he called a presser to say that although Republicans had disagreements, they were willing to go along for the good of the country.  The following morning there was another White House meeting and this time the press was there.  Obama seemed stunned that the R’s had taken the bait (rats! they agreed!) and he kept adding demands which finally the R leadership said just couldn’t work.  The Grand Bargain died, because Barack had scuttled it himself. 

 

Again, Clinton had the delegates whipped into frenzy over Medicare.  He noted that Obama intended to cut certain parts of Medicare and funnel it into the lockbox, thus saving Medicare until 2024.  Trouble is, that part of saving Medicare was never passed. (just an intention?) Then he said that the evil Ryan had a lot of gall to criticize Obama when his own budget had the same $716 B cut in Medicare cuts—which of course Obama never intended for cuts but savings.  Ahem!  Ryan’s original budget proposal was in 2009 when the Dems had a big majority.  He used the decreased MC spending as a baseline, hoping to advance an alternative that Dems would agree too--and they had agreed to the $716 B cuts in Obamacare.  But the D's demagogued Ryan as pushing granny off a cliff.  So when the R’s cleaned the House in 2010, he revised his budget and removed the MC cuts.  And that is the “Ryan budget” which has now passed the House several times but the Senate will not take up.  But Slick Willie made it sound like the original Ryan proposal, which was likely to not go anywhere, was the official Ryan budget of today.

 

But it isn’t just that Clinton can tell this BS.  He tells it with the purity and passion of a revivalist, and a cocky surety, like his story is verifiable facts.  He’s sincere and stops to tell us how he feels our pain.  And the crowd just goes into a feeding frenzy.  This is kinda humorous, yet sobering.  I imagine those speakers that whipped the crowds into frenzy in 1789 France until they wanted to guillotine every rich person in sight.  Were they jsut like Slick Willie?