Don't laugh. Forget the man's politics, if you wish. Forget "It depends what the definition of 'is' is," Bill Clinton is one of the most impressive speakers and communicators on the circuit today.
I'm currently posting a number of "Great Speeches You May Not Have Heard" on my website at www.irishmanspeaks.com and at least two Clinton speeches will appear.
I got particularly interested in Bill Clinton after I saw his remarks at the funeral for Coretta Scott King. Even right wing opponents gave him credit! A son of the segregated South, he became a powerful advocate for Civil Rights. But he was also not afraid to make some blunt comments. Many commentators suggest that Clinton's most impressive Civil Rights speech was when he spoke at the Convocation of the Church of God in Christ in Memphis, November 13, 1993.
President Clinton was still relatively new to the presidency when he spoke in Memphis and had yet to undergo the well publicized travails about his White House indiscretions. Clinton is a gifted orator and communicator if sometimes long-winded. Irrespective of his politics, he has the ability to empathize with people and make them feel good.
In Bob Shieffer's memoir, This Just In, Schieffer writes of his wife's reaction after meeting Bill Clinton for the first time. "He's got it. When he shook my hand, he held it just an instant longer than a person normally would, and he held eye contact just a second longer than someone you meet usually does not long enough to call it flirting, but just long enough to make you feel at that moment, you're the most important person in the room."
This speech and a number of others where he speaks from the heart does resonate strongly with the listener and reader. Interestingly, his speech writer Josh Gottheimer says Clinton spoke extemporaneously relying largely on notes he had scribbled on the original speech. Awesome!
Clinton basically decried the culture of violence which was destroying many aspects of the African-American community. He asked the audience "(If Dr. Martin Luther King)were to reappear by my side today and give us a report card on the last 25 years, what would be say?
The following are some truly powerful lines Clinton threw out. I quote them to show Clinton's ability to empathize with an audience and show how a brilliant orator can paint vivid, sometimes painful pictures.
"You did a good job, he would say, voting and electing people who formerly were not electable because of the color of their skin. You have more political power, and that is good. You did a good job, he would say, letting people who have the ability to do so live wherever they want to live, go wherever they want to go in this great country.
You did a good job, he would say, elevating people of color into the ranks of the United States Armed Forces to the very top or into the very top of our Government.
You did a very good job, he would say.
He would say, you did a good job creating a black middle class of people who really are doing well, and the middle class is growing more among African-Americans than among non-African-Americans. You did a good job; you did a good job in opening opportunity.
But he would say, I did not live and die to see the American family destroyed.
I did not live and die to see 13-year-old boys get automatic weapons and gun down 9-year-olds just for the kick of it.
I did not live and die to see young people destroy their own lives with drugs and then build fortunes destroying the lives of others. That is not what I came here to do.
I fought for freedom, he would say, but not for the freedom of people to kill each other with reckless abandon, not for the freedom of children to have children and the fathers of the children walk away from them and abandon them as if they don't amount to anything. I fought for people to have the right to work but not to have whole communities and people abandoned. This is not what I lived and died for."
Over the years, presidential speech writers have torn the passion out of presidential speeches. Clinton, like George W. Bush (and indeed most other speakers, presidential or not) when speaking from the heart, when not hidebound by
protocol and etiquette can and does connect.
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