Former President William J. Clinton delivers remarks at the Democratic National Convention on September 5, 2012 (full transcript). To watch Clinton’s speech in an interactive transcript player with side-by-side analysis, click here.
Former President Bill Clinton presented a lively defense of President Obama. Watch the speech and read reactions from Post writers and from Twitter.
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(APPLAUSE)
Thank you.
(APPLAUSE)
Now, Mr. Mayor, fellow Democrats, we are here to nominate a president...
(APPLAUSE)
... and I’ve got one in mind.
(APPLAUSE)
I want to nominate a man whose own life has known its fair share of adversity and uncertainty. I want to nominate a man who ran for president to change the course of an already weak economy and then, just six weeks before his election, saw it suffer the biggest collapse since the Great Depression, a man who stopped the slide into depression and put us on the long road to recovery, knowing all the while that no matter -- no matter how many jobs that he saved or created, there’d still be millions more waiting, worried about feeding their own kids, trying to keep their hopes alive.
I want to nominate a man who’s cool on the outside...
(APPLAUSE)
... but who burns for America on the inside.
(APPLAUSE)
I want -- I want a man who believes with no doubt that we can build a new American dream economy, driven by innovation and creativity, by education and, yes, by cooperation.
And by the way, after last night, I want a man who had the good sense to marry Michelle Obama.
(APPLAUSE)
You know...
(APPLAUSE)
I -- I...
(APPLAUSE)
I want -- I want Barack Obama to be the next president of the United States. And...
(APPLAUSE)
... I proudly nominate him to be the standard bearer of the Democratic Party.
(APPLAUSE) Now, folks, in Tampa a few days ago, we heard a lot of talk...
(LAUGHTER)
... all about how the president and the Democrats don’t really believe in free enterprise and individual initiative, how we want everybody to be dependent on the government, how bad we are for the economy. This Republican narrative, this alternative universe says that...
(APPLAUSE)
... every one of us in this room who amounts to anything, we’re all completely self-made. One of the greatest chairmen the Democratic Party ever had, Bob Strauss, used to say that every politician wants every voter to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself.
(LAUGHTER)
But, as Strauss then admitted, it ain’t so.
(LAUGHTER)
We Democrats, we think the country works better with a strong middle class, with real opportunities for poor folks to work their way into it, with a relentless focus on the future, with business and government actually working together to promote growth and broadly shared prosperity. You see, we believe that “We’re all in this together” is a far better philosophy than “You’re on your own.”
(APPLAUSE)
So who’s right? Well, since 1961, for 52 years now, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24. In those 52 years, our private economy has produced 66 million private- sector jobs. So what’s the job score? Republicans: twenty-four million. Democrats: forty-two.
(APPLAUSE)
Now, there’s -- there’s a reason for this. It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics. Why? Because poverty, discrimination, and ignorance restrict growth.
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