Bill Clinton’s performance

If the Obama campaign was thrilled with Hillary Clinton’s speech, they must be in ecstasy over Bill Clinton’s speech last night. It was vintage Bill Clinton.

By all accounts, he is very disappointed about Hillary losing, even more than she is, according to people close to the Clintons. But did anyone really doubt that he was going to give a primetime speech on national television in front of millions of people and not play the hero for the Obama campaign? Even if done purely out of self-interest, the speech he gave last night was exactly what the doctor ordered for this convention.

I thought there were two highlights to the speech. The first was when he talked about how the American people didn’t get to see Republican leadership in full bloom until 2001, when they took control of the White House and both houses of Congress. Pick a measurement from that point on and the results are bad — exploding debt, the shredding of constitutional protections, the dismantling of our credibility in leading the world on human rights issues, a military weakened and demoralized by badly executed adventures abroad, economic crisis at home. A powerful, virtually irrefutable argument.

The second high point was his comparison of the attacks on Obama to the attacks on him in 1992. The Republicans said the same thing about Clinton, that he was too young and too inexperienced (especially on foreign policy — remember Bush the Elder saying that his dog Millie knew more about foreign policy than Clinton?).

That really diminishes the power of that attack on Obama as Americans remember that the ’90s were better in America by almost any measure than they’ve been since 2000.