I watched Bill Clinton's speech on a screen in the conference centre. He spoke about as slowly as Gordon Brown did two days ago, but the effect - even over TV - was completely different. There is a strange mesmeric quality about hearing the man, which I can't quite get to the bottom of. Even when he's being completely vacuous, it's like he's saying the most important thing you are gonna hear all month. Tony Blair has this effect on some people but not me. I just think, as a speaker, Bill Clinton is one of the most skilful I've ever heard.
Some of the speech was interesting, some was platitudinous, but that was the idea. Get your best man on deck to establish the feelgood factor... I think a lot of the Labour Party feel some warmth towards Clinton anyway. His policy achivements in office are extremely minimal - probably less than Jimmy Carter, even. But he wasn't George Bush (Jnr) or Ronald Reagan, and in US politics, that means quite a lot. Also he was the prisoner of a hostile Congress for 6 years. His welfare reform policies were awful in the main, if you ask me (a more detailed post on that some other time) but at least he had at least half a clue on climate change.
At the moment I've very little idea of which contender might emerge for the Democrats in 2008, and that will probably be a big feature of giroscope in 2007 (assuming we last that long...) But if he/she could combine the slickness of the Clinton operation with some decent policy ideas then America might just manage to escape from the political kamikaze dive it's been in (with brief sunny interludes) since 1968. Gonna be a tough one, though.
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