Bill also criticizes Obama, Edwards
Posted: Sunday, January 06, 2008 5:48 PM by Mark Murray
From NBC/NJ's Mike Memoli and NBC's Mark Murray
NORTH CONWAY, NH -- Sticking to today's campaign theme, Bill Clinton said today that the choice for voters on Tuesday is not between change and experience, but actions and words.
Speaking to an overflow crowd in the North Country region of the state, Clinton referred to last night's debate as the "classic example" of this choice. "They want you to believe it’s change versus the status quo or change versus experience," he said. "Hillary wants you to believe it’s words versus deeds, talk versus action, rhetoric versus reality. You gotta decide who's right."
Clinton specifically focused on the exchange in which candidates were asked how they had brought about change. Without naming names, he noted that Edwards' example -- the Patients Bill of Rights -- didn't pass. And Obama's example, lobbying reform -- included loopholes. He then cited multiple examples that he said Hillary had achieved, some as a partner with him while he was in office, others on her own in the Senate.
"There’s a difference between talk and action," he said. "It makes a big difference if you’ve actually changed other people’s lives, and if it’s the work of your life."
Clinton also again tried to correct what he said was a flawed "narrative" in the race -- that Obama has been a pure anti-war voice. "Senator Obama’s tried to beat the livin' daylights out of Hillary and everyone else about this. But in 2004 at the convention he said he didn’t know how he would have voted," he said, adding that Obama claimed no difference between his position and George Bush’s on the war."It’s inconsistent with the narrative, that he was always against the war, and everybody else was for it,” he said. "It was far more complicated.”
However, as we mentioned earlier, Obama -- just before the 2004 Democratic convention -- said MUCH more than he didn't know how he would have voted on the Iraq war. "What would I have done? I don't know," he told the New York Times. "What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made." And: "What I don't think was appropriate was the degree to which Congress gave the president a pass on this."
Clinton spoke for over a half hour, and took more than an hour's worth of questions. While answering another one of them, he took a little credit for his punditry. "I told Hillary a year ago that what is now happening would happen," he said. "Everyone said, 'Well, she’ll get nominated easily but she’ll never be elected cause she’s so polarizing.' I said, ‘That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Everytime people see you... You will have more trouble getting nominated than you will winning the election."
