Bill Clinton DNC Speech: The 35 Most Memorable Quotes

Impact

Last night President Bill Clinton, in a masterful performance, made the case for four more years.  It was a typical lengthy (45 minute) Clinton speech. The speech was fun, lively, and provided a model for Obama surrogates to follow when defending the administration. The speech was filled with quotable sound bites and fact check opportunities. Here I have listed both.

Quotable Sound Bite Moments

1. “I want to nominate a man whose own life has known its fair share of adversity and uncertainty, a man who had the good sense to marry Michelle Obama.”

2. “One of our greatest Democratic Chairmen, Bob Strauss, used to say that every politician wants you to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself, but it ain't so.”

3. “We think "we're all in this together" is a better philosophy than "you're on your own.””

4. “Nobody’s right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day.  We’re compelled to spend our fleeting lives between those two extremes, knowing we’re never going to be right all the time and hoping we’re right more than twice a day.”

5. “They beat a Republican congressman because he said he realized he did not have to hate the president to disagree with him. Boy, that was a nonstarter, and they threw him out.”

7. “President Obama appointed several members of his Cabinet even though they supported Hillary in the primary. Heck, he even appointed Hillary”.

8. “In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president’s re-election went something like this: We left him a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough. So fire him and put us back in.”

9. “They want to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts. As another president once said, there they go again.”

10. “No president, not me, not any of my predecessors, no one could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years.”

11. “He has laid the foundation for a new, modern, successful economy of shared prosperity. Whether the American people believe what I just said or not may be the whole election.”

12. “Here’s another job score. President Obama: plus 4 1/2 million. Congressional Republicans: zero.”

13. “Governor Romney opposed the plan to save GM and Chrysler.  So here’s another job score. Are you listening in Michigan and Ohio and across the country?  Obama, 250,000; Romney, zero.”

14. “When Congressman Ryan looked into that TV camera and attacked President Obama’s Medicare savings as, quote, the biggest, coldest power play, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  You got to get one thing — it takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did. “

15. “Their campaign pollster said we are not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers. Now, finally I can say, that is true.  I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

16. “The Romney plan failed the first test of fiscal responsibility. The numbers just don’t add up”

17. “You ask which loopholes, and how much?  You know what they say? See me about that after the election.  That’s their position. See me about that after the election”

18. “People ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: Arithmetic”

19. “It was a highly inconvenient thing for them in our debates that I was just a country boy from Arkansas, and I came from a place where people still thought two and two was four. It’s arithmetic.”

20. “We simply cannot afford to give the reins of government to someone who will double down on trickle down.”

21. “President Obama’s plan passes the arithmetic test, and far more important, it passes the values test.”

22. “People have predicted our demise ever since George Washington was criticized for being a mediocre surveyor with a bad set of wooden false teeth.”

Fact Check Moments

1. “Since 1961, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24. In those 52 years, our economy produced 66 million private sector jobs. What's the jobs score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42 million!”

2. “They want to actually increase defense spending over a decade $2 trillion more than the Pentagon has requested without saying what they’ll spend it on.”

3. “When President Barack Obama took office, the economy had just shrunk 9 full percent of GDP. We were losing 750,000 jobs a month. If you look at the numbers, you know employment is growing, banks are beginning to lend again. And in a lot of places, housing prices are even beginning to pick up.”

4. “By 1996 the economy was roaring, everybody felt it, and we were halfway through the longest peacetime expansion in the history of the United States.”

5. “In 2010, as the president’s recovery program kicked in, the job losses stopped and things began to turn around. The recovery act saved or created millions of jobs and cut taxes for 95 percent of the American people. In the last 29 months, our economy has produced about 4 1/2 million private sector jobs.”

6. “During this period, more than 500,000 manufacturing jobs have been created under President Obama. That’s the first time manufacturing jobs have increased since the 1990s. There are now 250,000 more people working in the auto industry than on the day the companies were restructured.”

 7. “The agreement the administration made with the management, labor and environmental groups   will make us more energy independent. It will cut greenhouse gas emissions. And according to several analyses, over the next 20 years, it’ll bring us another half a million good new jobs into the American economy. The president’s energy strategy, which he calls “all of the above,” is helping too. The boom in oil and gas production, combined with greater energy efficiency, has driven oil imports to a near-20-year low and natural gas production to an all-time high. And renewable energy production has doubled.”

8. “Individuals and businesses have already gotten more than a billion dollars in refunds from insurance companies because the new law requires 80 to 85% of your premium to go to your health care, not profits or promotion. The gains are even greater than that because a bunch of insurance companies have applied to lower their rates to comply with the requirement. More than 3 million young people between 19 and 25 are insured for the first time because their parents’ policies can cover them. For the last two years — after going up at three times the rate of inflation for a decade, health care costs have been under 4% in both years for the first time in 50 years.

9. “Governor Romney wants to repeal those savings and give the money back to the insurance company. He wants to reopen the doughnut hole and force seniors to pay more for drugs reduce the life of the Medicare trust fund by eight full year. They want to block-grant Medicaid, and cut it by a third over the coming 10 years.”

10. “Two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for Medicare seniors who are eligible for Medicaid.”

11. “The administration agreed to give waivers to those governors and others only if they had a credible plan to increase employment by 20%, and they could keep the waivers only if they did increase employment.”

12. “In the 8 years I was president, we had a hundred times as many people move out of poverty into the middle class than happened under the previous 12 years”

13. “Republican economic policies quadrupled the national debt before I took office, in the 12 years before I took office and doubled the debt in the 8 years after I left.”