Bill Clinton to Criticize What He Calls Romney’s ‘Winner Take All’ Approach
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JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/GettyImages(CHARLOTTE, N.C.) — Former President Bill Clinton will tell Democrats Wednesday night the country has a choice between President Obama’s view of “shared responsibility” or what he said was Mitt Romney’s “winner take all” philosophy.
Clinton headlines the second night of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., and will officially nominate President Obama, a role typically performed by the nominee’s running mate.
Though Clinton and Obama have sparred in the past, especially during the 2008 Democratic primaries that pitted Obama against Hillary Clinton, Obama is betting that the former president, a Democrat who oversaw nearly a decade of economic prosperity, will remind voters of what having a Democrat in the White House can mean for their wallets.
Clinton is expected to make the case that Obama alone is capable of fixing the economic mess made by Republicans.
“In Tampa the Republican argument against the president’s re-election was pretty simple: We left him a total mess, he hasn’t finished cleaning it up yet, so fire him and put us back in,” he will say, according to released excerpts of his speech.
“I like the argument for President Obama’s re-election a lot better. He inherited a deeply damaged economy, put a floor under the crash, began the long hard road to recovery, and laid the foundation for a more modern, more well-balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses, and lots of new wealth for the innovators,” he says.
Clinton is also expected to say that a vote for Obama represents a vote for doing what is best for the country, not just for oneself.
“The most important question is, what kind of country do you want to live in? If you want a you’re-on-your-own, winner-take-all society, you should support the Republican ticket. If you want a country of shared prosperity and shared responsibility — a we’re-all-in-this-together society — you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden,” he says.
Clinton’s speech marks the apex of a previously rocky relationship with Obama. When Obama ran against his wife Hillary Clinton in 2008 for the Democratic nomination, Bill Clinton often jabbed Obama on the stump, even calling his campaign a “fairy tale.”
Hillary Clinton, now President Obama’s secretary of state and a possible 2016 contender, will not be at the convention. She is on an 11-day tour of Asia and the Pacific and is expected to be in the tiny island nation of East Timor at the time her husband takes the stage.
Democrats may be betting that Clinton will remind voters of more prosperous times under a Democratic president, but the Republicans said the former president’s presence will only remind voters of Obama’s failures.
Former House speaker and onetime Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich told USA Today that Clinton’s appearance is “an enormous risk” that would remind voters of how “pathetically bad Obama has been.”
GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, campaigning Wednesday in Iowa, said Clinton would do little more than deliver “a great rendition of how good things were in the 1990s. But we’re not going to hear much about how things have been in the last four years.”
Loyalists defended the campaign’s decision to parade out Clinton Wednesday night.
Clinton is “a former president who is very popular who can explain about the policies and the parallel tracks the two presidents have had in the sense of investing in education, investing in research and development, alternative energy and green energy and a responsible way of balancing the budget,” Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago who served in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, said on Good Morning America.
“I think he can do nothing but help and the notion that Newt is going to give our party strategic advice, no thank you,” he said.
Clinton, whose administration was marred by a sex scandal and impeachment trial, is more popular today than most public officials.
Democrats hope that popularity will rub off on Obama, who, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, has the lowest favorability rating of any incumbent president entering a convention.
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