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Clinton: If all students understood, this election would be over
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Clinton: If all students understood, this election would be over
By 4 p.m., the line to see former President Bill Clinton speak this evening at the Palestra basketball arena at University of Pennsylvania was wrapping down 33rd Street and over the South Street Bridge. And yet, by the looks of it, there weren't all that many people in the crowd who had voted for the guy.
"I was like 8 years old" when Clinton was in office, laughed Austin Jones, a 22-year-old Penn student. But what he's heard, he likes: "He came into a generally weak economy to start with, and he turned it around." But Clinton's speech wasn't going to spin him, Jones said. He already submitted an absentee ballot in Ohio (he didn't want to say who he supported), so he was only there as a spectator, not a potential voter. And he wasn't the only one who was there for nonpartisan reasons. Not far away, another Penn student admitted he supported Gov. Mitt Romney, but wanted to see Clinton speak, anyway. "It's not every day you get to see an ex-president speak. I admire Clinton a lot more than I admire Obama," he said, though he could recall little about the Clinton years. "Monica Lewinsky is probably the biggest thing I remember. I can't say that makes me like him less."
Still, the way Clinton told it — when he finally took the stage, after warm-up acts including Gov. Ed Rendell, Rep. Bob Brady, Rep. Chaka Fattah and an incredibly hoarse but enthusiastic Mayor Nutter — students should be lining up to back Obama at tomorrow's election. "The single most important education reform passed in the last four years, in the last several years, is the student loan reform. ... If every student in America understood what's in it and what Gov. Romney's position is, this election would be over."
President Obama's number-one stumper didn't skimp on the drama (or charm), calling Romney's plans "trickle-down economics" and insisting that "everything I've been fighting for since I was a boy is on the line."
He highlighted the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Obamacare, the president's Hurricane Sandy relief efforts and the success of the auto-industry bailout, while ridiculing the Romney camp for suggesting that the president had supported jobs being sent overseas to China, and that he "worked with the Italians" to do so. "When I was a kid and I got my hand caught in the cookie jar ... I turned red and I took my hand out of the cookie jar. Gov. Romney just keeps diggin' for more cookies."
Clinton got the crowd roaring, but Rendell (after unsubtly plugging his book, A Nation of Wusses, "available at the Penn bookstore") reminded them that turnout in Philly could be critical -- and it's what happens Tuesday that counts. "We need to beat the margin of four years ago" in Philadelphia. "It means no excuses tomorrow."
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