Bill Clinton Hasn’t Lost His Zeal for Boosting Democrats on the Trail

From the Dispatch Politics on The Dispatch

Happy Friday! Election Day is 18 days away. Have you ever felt like someone is raising expectations too high for you? We bet you didn't have it like then-Sen. Barack Obama, whose comedy routine at the 2008 Al Smith Dinner was hyped up by his opponent, the late Sen. John McCain.

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In North Carolina, Bill Clinton Relishes Being Back on the Trail

DURHAM, North Carolina—The former president sat up in his chair onstage, appearing to listen attentively as Gov. Tim Walz, the current Democratic nominee for vice president, ticked through the lines of his stump speech. This is Bill Clinton's ninth presidential election since and including his first White House campaign in 1992. He's heard it all—every talking point, every manufactured quip, every soaring bit of rhetoric guaranteed to make an audience break out in applause. Whenever Walz deployed a laugh line, Clinton's slack jaw would tighten, his head would turn to look at someone in the audience, and he would grin.

"I'm a little bit giddy here, I'm standing on a stage with the 42nd president of the United States," said Walz as the crowd of several hundred, standing in the basketball gym in a recreation center in Durham's Lyon Park neighborhood Thursday afternoon, erupted into cheers. "This is the Comeback Kid."

And Clinton keeps coming back, election after election, to campaign for Democrats. He has a busy schedule this weekend in North Carolina, hitting multiple stops throughout the majority-black rural areas in the eastern part of the state. He'll even attend a service at a black church on Sunday morning. It's part of the all-hands-on-deck approach to boosting Harris in the final weeks of the race that also has Barack Obama making campaign appearances on the vice president's behalf.

But it's clear the 78-year-old Clinton in particular relishes being on the trail. Ever the "explainer-in-chief," he spent nearly 40 minutes in Durham walking the audience methodically through the case for Harris, never seeming to grow tired as he made long discursions about consolidation in the grocery retail industry or mused about where he would prefer to be imprisoned in a second Trump administration. (Guantanamo Bay, Clinton reasoned, because "when you're 78, you're a lot more worried about being too cold than being too hot.") After his speech, Clinton and Walz both stepped down from the stage to shake hands and take selfies. One woman excitedly placed her baby with her in the frame with Clinton as her husband snapped a photo on his phone. Clinton's grin as he walked the rope line never slipped.

That's not to say that the Big Dog's oratorical gifts haven't begun to falter. His voice has become shaky and soft, so much so that once he took the microphone on Thursday, his first few words were so difficult to hear that people in the back of the room began to shout, "We can't hear you!" Clinton leaned into the microphone, cleared his throat, and said forcefully, "Can you hear now?"

The room applauded, but the truth was that much of the rest of his lengthy speech was not easy to pick up in the echoing gym. The audience was almost silent throughout, with people leaning in to hear what the legendary Democrat had to say. Clinton himself seemed to acknowledge that he had more presidential races behind him than in front of him.

"I don't know how many more elections I'll be involved with," he said with more than a touch of melancholy, before making his winking turn. "Heck, I'm only two months younger than Donald Trump."

While most of the crowd was old enough to have memories of Clinton's presidency, a number of the young people in attendance—including students from nearby Duke University and the historically black North Carolina Central University—had not even been born by the time he left office in 2001.

Ashante Farrior, a recent graduate of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, is one of them. Asked by Dispatch Politics after the Durham rally if she had seen Clinton before, she responded in the negative. "I'm 22, so it's like, I'd only heard about the guy," she said. "It's cool, though."

The same goes for Gabryelle Lane, a high-school student from Holly Springs who attended the rally with her mother. "I've heard a lot about him, and I'm just really interested in what he has to say in his take of what's going on now," Lane told Dispatch Politics.

Her mother, Kenya Lane, said it was her first time seeing Clinton in person and seemed wide-eyed in amazement after the fact. "He's gotten older, of course," Kenya said. "But he's still talking strong."

Strong or not, Clinton seemed as reluctant as ever to give up the microphone in Durham, even 35 minutes in. "You seldom get a chance to get as much good for as many people with one decision. So go out there and win this, because—" Clinton said as the by-then impatient crowd burst out in applause for what sounded like a closing line. The former president coughed, cleared his throat again, and kept going. "Your families need you. Future generations need you."

The tired-looking Teamsters sitting in the bleachers behind the stage began to stand up, waving their signs, trying to will an end to the rally. And for two more excruciating minutes, Clinton extolled the virtues of early voting, of talking to friends and loved ones about the election, and about fighting for the future for the children.

"You can do it, and I think you will," he said, at long last, as the music on the PA system played him and Walz off the stage.

In Backing Harris, Women Point to Abortion Rights as Driving Factor

LA CROSSE, Wisconsin—At a Thursday afternoon rally, Vice President Kamala Harris did not mention abortion until she was more than halfway through her remarks here. When she did, it got some of the loudest applause of the day.

"It is my pledge to you that when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom nationwide, as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law," she said as the crowd at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse recreation center roared.

Many of Harris' most committed female voters in La Crosse say their primary motivation for backing her is her support for legal access to abortion. In conversations with half a dozen women who came to see the vice president here, nearly all of them mentioned abortion as a key reason for their support, with several listing it first among the issues they care most about.

"She supports a woman's right to choose and, as a woman, I think that's really, really important," Charlotte Tompkins, an 18-year-old student, told Dispatch Politics.

If Harris wins the 2024 presidential election, it will be in part thanks to her strong numbers with women and the potency of the abortion issue. In a recent poll from the New York Times, women broke for Harris over Donald Trump 56 percent to 40 percent, while men sided with the former president 53 percent to 42 percent. An issue survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation released last week found abortion was the No. 3 issue—behind inflation and threats to democracy—for female voters generally and the top issue for women under 30. For months, Trump has attempted to shore up his support among female voters by insisting the regulation of abortion be left up to the states. That has not dissuaded Democrats from tying him to abortion bans at the state level.

At her Thursday rally, Harris told the crowd, which appeared to be majority female, that a third of American women "live in a state with a Trump abortion ban," accusing him of making his three Supreme Court appointments with the intention that they would overturn Roe v. Wade.

Among women at the rally, support for Harris' position on abortion spanned age groups. Allison Hafner, 52, said she was "here for women's rights."

"I'm a big pro-choice person, and I don't think anybody should tell us what we can and cannot do with our bodies," she told Dispatch Politics.

Bonnie Roe, a 72-year-old retiree, echoed her comments. "I don't think any man—or woman—should tell another woman what she should be doing with her own body. I think that's just totally wrong," she said.

While the women here were united in their backing of Harris' abortion stance, their views varied on why men should support the vice president. The way Roe sees it, the potential for women they know to lose access to abortion should be reason enough for men to vote for her.

"Most of them have mothers, sisters, daughters, cousins, and any one of those women could be trapped in an unwanted pregnancy or dangerous pregnancy," she said. "And that they would take the side of no abortion rights at all in this country and let their loved ones die because some politician says abortion should be outlawed is so wrong."

A 36-year-old named Amber, who works in social services and declined to give her last name, meanwhile, said the insults Trump regularly directs at Harris and other women are detrimental.

"I'd say that if you have a daughter who wants to be in any position of leadership or any position that, like, has wielding throughout the world, you should encourage her and not demean her with nicknames and the things that Donald Trump perpetuates, such as insulting women's intelligence," she said.

A male attendee, 35-year-old Tim Schneider, who works as a public school teacher in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was in town visiting his mother, said he would pitch his fellow men on helping the women in their lives, arguing that a Harris presidency would be better for Americans in general.

"Think of your wives and think of your daughters. I don't think it has to go a whole lot more further than that," he said in reference to women losing abortion access. "But also, I mean, even if you look at the policies, Kamala's policies are better for 95 percent of Americans across the board."

Eyes on the Trail

Notable and Quotable

"I guess I just don't see the point of taking shots at myself when other people have been shooting at me for a hell of a long time."

—Former President Donald Trump at the Al Smith Dinner explaining why he did not want to make self-deprecating jokes, October 17, 2024