More Potential First Spouses

In the film "Primary Colors," which tells the story of the 1992 presidential campaign, the character representing Bill Clinton stays late into the night talking to a worker at a small donut shop. This evening I saw what that characterization was based on. At a small event with perhaps 75 people, former President Clinton gave a speech encouraging people to vote for his wife and finished it by taking questions from anyone in the audience who wanted to ask one. I asked him about youth turnout in Iowa and how the Clinton campaign was planning to encourage turnout. He said, “She’s been doing a lot of events here, around the country … the Obama campaign simply did a better outreach.”

While Hillary never mentioned Iowa, Bill noted failures in Iowa and encouraged New Hampshire to have its own campaign and not simply follow Iowa’s results. He also spoke a great deal about his own presidency, comparing his record on jobs with that of President Bush’s and promising Hillary would offer a return to more prosperous times.

His audience was young, perhaps because it was located in a bar and in a university town. They were an excited crowd, though some started filtering out before the end. President Clinton stayed on even after the end of his remarks, having individual discussions among the mass of people who approached him.