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Posted June 29, 2006
Transcript of Keynote Speech by President Bill Clinton


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And then there were 20 percent in the middle who could swing either way, and it tended to produce a politics of convergence, especially during Cold War. Now the Republicans gained, after 1968, a base of 45 percent which is why they won the presidency so much, except for Watergate and then when I was fortunate enough to be elected twice, because if their base is 40 percent and ours is 40 then we have to win two-thirds of the undecided votes to win. Sometime during my Presidency, the demographic changes in America and the… basically the results that came along, evened up the bases so that by the time Al Gore and George Bush ran and by the time John Kerry and George Bush ran, we had more or less even bases, but they were very high, with only about 10 percent of a moveable vote.


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And that’s why the Republican strategy of turning out a higher percentage of their base vote, registering and voting them, was more likely to succeed or at least enable them to eke out narrow victories than would have been the case when the bases were 40/40 as opposed to 45/45. Now my problem is, I don’t think that this way of doing politics and making policy is good for America because it tends to give you policies based on ideology rather than evidence and decision making. And I could give you lots of examples, it tends to… just to have policies that instead of being made on evidence and then perfected and modified through argument, policies made on ideology and then rammed through… through attack.

We saw… the best example of that was in the 2002 election when Max Cleland, who lost two legs and an arm in Vietnam, was pictured in television ads alongside John Walker Lindh and Saddam Hussein as threatening the security of America because he voted against President Bush’s version of the Homeland Security Bill, which was a mixed blessing at best. I guess it did slightly more good than harm, but there was a lot of adversity in it. And Cleland didn’t vote for their version because it took 170,000 federal workers who had no access to confidential data or technology and treated them like they were CIA agents, which meant that they could be fired without federal job protections.

And he basically said, 'I didn’t leave half my body in Vietnam to come and strip 170,000 workers of their job rights just to get re-elected.' Now if he'd said it like that he might have been re-elected, but… he… it was like the Swift boat deal, he couldn’t believe that they were doing this to him. I mean how much more could he give to his country and still be able to function? And a guy who had several deferments in Vietnam beat him for the Senate, by making him look like he was Saddam’s toady because he was opposed to a particular version of a bill that the President himself had opposed for eight months.

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And if you look at all these Republican senators that like her, you know they basically thought they weren’t even going to talk to her. They’ve done a good job of demonizing her. We nominated John Kerry because we thought he was the most electable and by the time we got to the election he had a 48 percent negative. As long as their… their strategy of divide and demonize works, they’re going to work on whoever the top dog is. So it’s naive for us to think that we can nominate anybody running for office who won’t have a much higher negative on election day than they do at the time we nominate them.

And Michael Dukakis was ahead but when he became the Democratic nominee... Al Gore and John Kerry both could have easily won those elections, they were characterized and caricatured, and they have been doing this ever since 1980 to great effect -- except on me. They didn’t like me because I grew up in the South and I understood who they were. These were basically all ultra-conservative, White Southerners that do this and I’ve lived with this all my life, that’s who they… and that’s how they deal with people. And so I had an unusual understanding about it, not 'cause I was a Southerner, but because I’m part of that culture, which almost made them hate me more because I was an apostate, you know.

But I… you don’t… we’re naive if we think that any… we can nominate anybody that won’t have a high negative and be somewhat polarizing by election day and she has proved that she can unite people who deal with her instead of dealing with a cartoon of her that’s embedded. There was a survey done here in Arkansas showing her winning a presidential heat against the governor who might enter the primaries here. This is the only red state in which she is not a cartoon, the only one. But the American people are fundamentally fair minded after the nominating process is over, they give everybody a shot.

Talking about elections, Robert Kennedy Jr. just wrote an article in Rolling Stone claiming the Bush Administration stole the last election. Do you think it was, and how can we guard against something like that going on in the future?

WJC: I must say I read Robert Kennedy’s article in Rolling Stone and I think all of you should if you haven’t. And before I read it, I was convinced that President Bush had won Ohio… I… I thought it would have been ironic if he had lost the election in the electoral college and won the popular vote, that is if he went out the same way he came in. But… but I think that… I think that -- two things, I think there is no question that Al Gore would have won Florida if all the votes had been counted and the people who intended to vote for him had their votes counted.

Between the people whose votes were thrown out for erroneous double voting instructions in Jacksonville and the 3400 Jewish Democrats who voted for Pat Buchanan in the butterfly ballot, and several others, there’s no question that several thousand more people in Florida intended to vote for Gore and showed up on election day. And I still believe that the two Bush v. Gore decisions will go down as one of the four or five worst decisions in the history of the United States Supreme Court. I think it was a disgrace. And I think if… if Gore had been ahead and Bush had been behind, the Supreme Court would have voted nine to nothing to count all the votes by uniform standard. That’s what I think would have happened. You may not agree but that’s what I… I used to teach that course, Constitutional Law. That’s what I think.

In this case, I think… You know, I don’t have an opinion, but I thought Robert Kennedy made a very persuasive case and what was clear is that the Secretary of State, now their candidate for governor, was a world class expert in voter suppression and that he was doing everything he could to keep voters that he thought were Democrats from voting, in every way that he could. And I think that is wrong. And I hope that the voters of Ohio will repudiate it. I mean, you know, we ought to be in the business of getting more people to vote, not fewer.

We don’t have as many people… heck they had 70 percent of the voters voted in Iraq in the last election, they had a better voter turnout than we did and a bunch of them were risking their lives. So I don’t think we ought to be ratifying the public service of anybody who thinks it’s his job to keep people from voting and that’s … but I don’t have an opinion because I didn’t know anything about it ‘til I read Robert Kennedy’s article. But he sure as heck raised a… he made a compelling case, those numbers that he said in some of those precincts, the probability of the vote total being that much at variance with the exit polls was one in 600,000.

And it happened over and over and over again. So if you haven’t read the article, I urge you to read it and when you go back home I urge you to look at… you know, again this is without regard to party, I just don’t think we ought to be suppressing voters. We ought to be getting them to the polls and letting them vote and letting them have their say.

There has been a dramatic attempt to increase the secrecy of government and the unaccountability of public actions and there has been an attempt to maintain the majority by dividing the American electorate and getting people whose economic and social interests are not well served to vote with them over the so-called values issues, including gay marriage, the flag burning amendment, the Schiavo case and many others.