This was the first time I’ve seen Clinton talk in person. My dad was briefly personally recruited by him to be a doc in Arkansas, while he was governor, but declined. Let’s just call it a bullet dodged and move on. <\/p>\n
I think we hit a pretty good balance of getting there early enough to have decent seats, but not waiting too long for them. His speech centered around 5 points. <\/p>\n
1. We need good security from terrorism. But he was quite explicit in pointing out that good security in the case of terrorism is the stuff you never hear about, I believe he actually said “never gets seen in the paper”. He didn’t mention Valerie Wilson, though that would have been an excellent opportunity to do so, if he were trying to make a partisan slam speech.
\n2. We need to make more friends and fewer enemies, turning enemies into friends, is in fact, job number one. He pointed out the opinion polls turning for America and against Bin Laden in countries receiving US aid after national disasters.
\n3. He cited a need for international cooperations as opposed to going it alone. At this point, he got into a compare and contrast with the current administration. I don’t remember him making a strong case for this point, but the audience, myself included, was highly receptive, and I wasn’t taking notes. He did make the case that the US is currently in a position of power, and that that power will likely decline, and that we may wish to set the world up so that it’s the way we want it when “we aren’t the biggest dog on the block.”
\n4. He talked about the importance of caring for our population, and maintaining our environment. He made the point that we are rare in our failure to provide the health of our citizens, that it’s not economically efficient, and several other points besides. He compared our national healthcare expenditures as a percent of gdp. He compared our administrative overhead in the private healthcare system and noted that it was way higher than everyone else’s.
\n5. His final point was about balancing our budget, both at the federal level and on the individual level. And the danger of mortgaging our future for current consumption. (I look guiltily at my own credit card debt here).<\/p>\n
And he tied all of it in to the morality and\/or ethics of how we want to live and how we think we ought to live. It was a good speech. As I expected, I very much enjoyed it. The two hours of crowd to get in was a bit much, but so it goes. It was good, and I’m glad I went. Matt provided conversation such that I didn’t mind the wait so much. And thoughtful commentary afterwards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This was the first time I’ve seen Clinton talk in person. My dad was briefly personally recruited by him to be a doc in Arkansas, while he was governor, but declined. Let’s just call it a bullet dodged and move on. I think we hit a pretty good balance of getting there early enough to … Continue reading “Clinton talk”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}