Former President Bill Clinton said a lot of things during his his hour-long speech in Tampa last night before a crazed crowd of 1,000 supporters at a campaign rally here Friday night.
It would be nice to know what most of it was. We're not sure whether it was the mic system, or his apparent exhaustion, or that Clinton had just emerged from a long, strange bender and had tales to tell -- but whatever it was, we couldn't understand much of his back country mumbling. Confused looks passed among the audience member and reporters compared notes while Bill barreled through it, apparently unaware that few people knew what he was saying.
The bits and pieces we gleaned from the diatribe, fresh out of our our notes:
"He's trying to figure out global warming; he's not ignoring it like the other party. ...
(Unintelligible.)
"Committed."
"Taking care of every man."
GURGLE GURGLE MUMBLE
"Everyone."
But did it really matter?
Bill understands it's the visceral impact and delivery of a speech that's important -- not the talking points. And he needed to pack all the heat he could into Friday night: In the day's latest polls, Romney's got a slight lead over Barack. (Translation: Go vote!)
This on the heels of earlier polls that showed Obama was slightly ahead. In the last week, Florida has become quite possibly the most contested race in the nation, with both of the campaigns packing in as much money and face time as they can into the state before the election.
But all of this does seem to make Bill a little tired. He did at one point refer to New York as his "home town." Still, let's go a little easy on Bill. This was his fourth of five campaign stops Friday -- Tallahassee was next. This campaigning stuff is hard.
HR>
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