Bill Clinton is aging. This was obvious to anyone who paid attention to the president’s mannerisms, his speech, and his posture on Wednesday night. Yet he’s still the same Bill Clinton at heart, and that was evident by the fact that he stood in front of convention goers and told a number of untruths with a straight face, and with a nearly straight index finger stuck defiantly into the air.
For example, Clinton claimed Obama deserves four more years because Obama’s approach to economics “reduces the deficit.” Meanwhile, in the real world, the deficit accumulated by every president between George Washington and George W. Bush combined was $4.176 trillion. Yet in just under four years, Obama has pushed that to over $16 trillion.
At another point in his speech, Clinton seemed so carried away with the idea of speaking to a rapt audience again that he just let ‘er rip and said Obama’s economic policies “pass the arithmetic test.”
To hear these and many other statements so antithetical to reality spoken so confidently was surreal to say the least. And I don’t think I’m the only one who saw it thus. Fox News’ Brit Hume, for his part, commenting after the speech, kindly pointed out that the index finger Clinton had lifted into the air repeatedly during this convention speech was the same index finger he’d wagged in our faces when he said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
The bottom line: Clinton’s speech was nothing more than the same snake oil, brought to us by an older salesman.