- Kimberly DeFalco
- Bill Clinton speaks Friday night in St. Petersburg
Bill Clinton campaigned for Barack Obama 40 times in 2008, he told the audience at the Coliseum in St. Petersburg on Friday night as he took the stage at about 6:10 p.m.
But he said, pausing, “I am far more enthusiastic about him than I was four years ago!!” in perhaps his most energetic line of the evening, coming in the first minute of his nearly 45-minute long, very wonkish address before approximately 2,000 people.
St. Pete was the fourth stop in a five-appearance campaign day in the Sunshine State for the 42nd president of the U.S, which has to be some sort of record for any such high-profile surrogate. But this isn’t any surrogate, this is The Big Dog, now 66-years old, a man who underwent quadruple bypass surgery after suffering a heart attack eight years ago. Clinton was to follow up with one last rally in Tallahassee after St. Pete, following earlier events in Ft. Myers, Palm Bay, and Palm Beach County.
So the ex-prez was a little less energetic than usual, and did we say he was pretty wonky? He also was very hoarse, and the already less than stellar sound system ended up garbling large amounts of his speech on first listen, frustrating some members of the audience who bailed out before it ended at around 6:45 p.m.
Frankly, if you want quotes from the speech, I suggest you read the Tampa Tribune or the Tampa Bay Times because I could barely take any notes, so bad was the sound in the high school gymnasium-type of atmosphere that the Coliseum felt like Friday night.
Let me put it this way: if the sound was this bad at Clinton’s speech at the Democratic Convention in Charlotte in early September, Barack Obama would be in a lot worse shape in his bid for re-election. Clinton’s stemwinder at the DNC was a spellbinder, the “explainer-in-chief” giving a crafty and energetic and understandable presentation of President Obama’s challenges and triumphs that instantly gave the Democrats a real “bounce,” wowing the media and making it the first game-changer that the campaign had been looking for all year long.
This article appears in Nov 1-7, 2012.
