My favorite FactCheck.org article was about Clinton, Our Clinton Nightmare. "Former President Bill Clinton’s stem-winding nomination speech was a fact-checker’s nightmare: lots of effort required to run down his many statistics and factual claims, producing little for us to write about. Republicans will find plenty of Clinton’s scorching opinions objectionable. But with few exceptions, we found his stats checked out."
Ezra Klein wrote about Clinton's claims about Obama's $4 trillion deficit reduction plan. Sarah Kilff on Fact-checking Bill Clinton on Medicare, again she finds him mostly accurate. Dylan Matthews on Fact-checking Bill Clinton on the economy counts 19 True, 7 True with a but, 1 false. The false is about structural changes in the economy accounting for job loses (people don't have the right skills for the new jobs). This is a conservative talking point about the recession. Here's more on this, Bill Clinton says the unemployed don’t have the right skills. It’s not so.
Kevin Drum concludes "Republicans will dutifully attack back, but really, most of them are probably just shaking their heads and wishing they had someone like him in their party."
Ezra Klein called Clinton wonk-in-chief. "Tonight, his role was wonk-in-chief, and he was trying to persuade the public of an old idea: That the best way to understand this election is to simply do the arithmetic. And so, for 48 minutes, that’s pretty much what he did. The question now is whether the Romney campaign can persuade voters that there’s a mistake in Clinton’s math."
digby says "The best thing about the speech wasn't the content, although much of that (with some exceptions) was good, it was the fact that he showed America once again that you can talk about policy specifics in a political speech in a way that's not condescending but is easy to understand. Nobody thinks it's possible, but he does it. More politicians should try."
James Fallows says Why Bill Clinton's Speeches Succeed, "Because he treats listeners as if they are smart." and he compares it to sports talk. "Different people have different natural modes for their speech, and not many people can pull it off just the way Clinton does. But Clinton reminds us of the value (and rarity) of this tone in politics -- and the next time you listen to a sports-talk channel, think how much better our political discussion would be if participants assumed as much sophistication about argument as ESPN and radio-talk hosts do. "
Molly Ball said "But the strength of his speech came in its efforts to persuade. Clinton made arguments. He talked through his reasoning. He went point by point through the case he wanted to make. He kept telling the audience he was talking to them and he wanted them to listen. In an age when so many political speeches are pure acts of rhetoric, full of stirring sentiments but utterly devoid of informational value -- when trying to win people over to your point of view is cynically assumed to be futile, so you settle for riling them up instead -- Clinton's felt like a whole different thing. In an era of detergent commercials, he delivered a real political speech."
Sarah Kliff shows Bill Clinton’s speech (in graphs). It's mostly about the length but there's a word cloud too if you like those sorts of things. My favorite was this:
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