Bill Clinton in Durham, North Carolina | October 17, 2024

 Auto-transcribed on Friday, October 18, 2024.media and text playback available on this page: https://aliceapp.ai/recordings/yNlGdbJV4xzAUEtfukhjQ7TXgmv5_Rpc

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Words: 	4,099 	
Duration: 	00:37:47 	
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Uploaded on: 	2024-10-18 02:09:45 UTC 	
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Speakers:

 Bill Clinton - 100.0%

Notes:

Summary by ChatGPT- Democracy and Civic Engagement: Clinton emphasizes the importance of active participation in democracy, urging citizens to engage in the electoral process and advocate for their rights.- Unity and Common Purpose: He calls for unity among Americans, stressing the need to come together to address shared challenges and work toward common goals.- Education and Opportunity: Clinton discusses the significance of education as a pathway to opportunity, advocating for investments in education to empower future generations.- Global Leadership and Responsibility: He highlights the role of the United States as a leader on the global stage, stressing the importance of international cooperation in addressing global issues.- Economic Growth and Equality: Clinton addresses the need for economic policies that promote growth while ensuring that the benefits are shared equitably among all citizens.

[00:00:01]  Bill Clinton 
Thank you.

[00:00:05]   
Let's give him a hand.

[00:00:12]   
I just have one thing to say off the bat.

[00:00:22]   
People who say on the other side, Kamala Harris is an unknown quantity, a, uh, dangerous radical.

[00:00:34]   
Can you hear now? So all these critics of our candidate, Kamala Harris, they often say, well, she's an unknown quality. She's a quantity, she's a dangerous radical, whatever. The first decision she made was Tim Walts. I think she did pretty good.

[00:01:01]   
It says a lot about what kind of president she'll be.

[00:01:07]   
The first decision Donald Trump made was JD Vance, who now has defied countless courts full of judges, many of whom, um, Trump appointed to say, no, he didn't lose in 2020. Poor baby. The whole thing was rigged.

[00:01:37]   
And he had the gall to say in his debate with Tim that he didn't want to destroy the health care bill with its protections for people with pre existing conditions. He was just trying to make it more sound. That was a whopper.

[00:01:59]   
And there are probably 30% of the people in this audience, maybe more, who have family, are certainly friends, who would be affected if we got rid of the protection against charging people with pre existing conditions more. That reason alone should be enough to defeat the Trump ticket in North Carolina and America.

[00:02:34]   
So I really liked him. Waltz. He spent his whole life serving his community and our country. He's made a positive difference in every role he's ever played. He left a rewarding career as a teacher and a coach, but he didn't leave his roots behind.

[00:02:56]   
He told me that his old football team just won against its arch rival, and he went home and checked on it in the middle of this election.

[00:03:11]   
He was in the national guard for 24 years. He represented a rural congressional district that had elected only one other Democrat in more than a century. They trusted him. And after he flipped it blue, he proved that you can compromise without compromising your values to make the system work again. He worked across the aisle on the farm bill, on veterans issues.

[00:03:40]   
Aren't you sick of all this bad mouthing, slimming talk that dominates american?

[00:03:54]   
He proves it doesn't have to be this way. Look at his record as governor. He's done unbelievable things for working families, especially for those that have children. He's given the biggest tax cuts in Minnesota history. Paid leave, free school meals.

[00:04:21]   
And I could have sat here for another hour, listen to him talk. Cause he reminds me of home.

[00:04:29]   
Let's cut to the shake. Take chase.

[00:04:37]   
I don't know how many more elections I'll be involved with, and I'm too old to gild a lily heck, I'm only two months younger than Donald Trump.

[00:04:55]   
Good news for you is I will not spend 30 minutes swaying back and forth from you.

[00:05:09]   
I've played enough music. I will not clap offbeat, nor will I pretend to be a conductor, because we got a race to win, and we have to win it. I've been doing this a long, long time, and I can honestly say that this time, I am not here running for anything anymore except for my grandchildren's future.

[00:05:40]   
Now, you just heard of. You just heard what Tim Waltz said. So think about this when I describe what the decision is before North Carolina. In the country, a presidential election is just a great job interview for the most important job in the world. And since you do the hiring, you have to decide what the criteria for the job are.

[00:06:11]   
And, in effect, the american people make that decision every presidential election, over and over and over. So how do you decide? What questions will you ask? Here are the questions that I hope you'll ask. Which candidate will take us forward, which will take us backward, which will give our children a broader future or a darker, more uncertain one, which will make us more united and which will relish in every new division, which will make us all feel heard and seen, regardless of who we vote for?

[00:07:03]   
And when the election's over, will we all live under the same set of rules? That's a big deal in a democracy. It's not just about who gets the most votes. It's what rules do you play barring when it's over? He's got a Supreme Court that virtually said, once you get to be president, you can just make out the rules.

[00:07:30]   
And he keeps talking about how he wants to get even and may have to call out the military on our own people.

[00:07:39]   
The danger within, I suppose that includes me.

[00:07:47]   
And, uh, I mean, basically, he's asserted the right to go after anybody that he thinks and his wisdom is a threat. Right. You sign a. The oath says you promise to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And he said, I think I'll start with domestic.

[00:08:18]   
Bring me the army. Now, I used to like President Clinton.

[00:08:28]   
I once said only he and Ronald Reagan were the great president since World War Two. But I've had a change of heart, and I think he needs to go away for a long time. And I'm not going to execute him, although I could under the supreme Court's ruling. But I, uh, think I'll just send him to the Colorado supermax for the rest of his life.

[00:08:55]   
So I've already got a petition ready I want him to transfer me to Guantanamo, because when you're 78, you're a lot more worried about it being too cold than being too hot.

[00:09:17]   
We're laughing about this. But let me tell you something. Being president is a sacred duty. And the sheer joy I had every day, I'll never be able to replay all of you for even the terrible days when they were trying to tear my head off, there was always something good you could do for someone.

[00:09:47]   
And the idea, the idea that we should give in to grievance and resentment and scores settling.

[00:10:08]   
You know, even my mother used to say that my greatest weakness as a politician is I could never remember who I was supposed to be mad at. But when you get a job like that, you are supposed to do your best to be fair to everybody and try to do something that's good for everybody.

[00:10:27]   
That's what the job says. That's what the constitution says. That's what you mean.

[00:10:34]   
I think by forming a more perfect union, it doesn't say, we, the people of the United States, in order to take up sides and bash the living hell out of the other side and tear them to pieces. It says, we are supposed to form a, um, more perfect union. And I can tell you, and I know both the candidates pretty well.

[00:11:03]   
I think Kamala Harris is the only candidate in this way who has the vision, the experience, the temperament, and, yes, the will to do that on good and bad days. One of the things I find most interesting about Donald Trump, which has surprised me as someone who's known him over the years, during times when we had a perfectly cordial relationship, and he was nice to me, until he decided Hillary should be locked up for her email practices, which his own State Department later said, remember that?

[00:11:50]   
That was the biggest issue. And she ran his own State Department later said she sent out exactly zero confidential emails and received exactly zero. And somehow he was able to make that the biggest issue in 2016. But anyway, he now makes us all listen to his personal grievances and these kind of crazy conspiracy theories.

[00:12:19]   
And his buddy, Congresswoman Green, the other day, said that the deep state had now perfected the ability to direct tornadoes and hurricanes, remember?

[00:12:33]   
So that instead of what usually happens, ah, is that eastern North Carolina is hit. Western, more red North Carolina was hit as if we did that on purpose. And they want people to believe that.

[00:12:57]   
I remember when I was a young man, I fell in love with Thomas Wolfe's novels, and I read all of them, and I couldn't wait for the chance to go to Asheville. And it is a beautiful place, you know, and when I was younger, I played that Grove Park Inn golf course that President Woodrow Wilson played.

[00:13:21]   
The idea that anyone would willfully destroy a, uh, treasure like that or hurt people in a part of the state or the nation because of their politics is appalling. But I am sure now there are people who believe it. What happened?

[00:13:39]   
We lost our local newspapers, we lost our locally owned radio stations, and everything was supplanted by the most extreme social media sites and, uh, our friends on Fox News. By the way, she did a good job with Bret Bera.

[00:14:06]   
So one of the things that bothers me is when somebody starts grinding on somebody else and saying how bad they are and how awful they are, they never really tell you the full story. Certainly Mister Trump doesn't, and he doesn't have any plans. This is the most important thing for you to actually solve the problems that he moans about, cause solutions and getting along better with your neighbors are bad for his brand.

[00:14:46]   
Isn't that right? I mean, you don't have to count the lies.

[00:14:50]   
You just count the eyes. Sun came up this morning. I made it happen.

[00:15:01]   
It rained yesterday. If I had been president, it never would have happened.

[00:15:08]   
It's always about him. One reason I want Kamala Harris is it will be about you.

[00:15:20]   
Number two, Kamala Harris wants to go forward, not backward. She doesn't want to waste any time talking about all this stuff that we can get a lot of laughs about. Look at inflation, the economy.

[00:15:37]   
I know a little something about this. I did have that job for eight years, and we had the longest peacetime experience, expansion in history. We had the first balance budget in 30 years. The first three. First three surpluses in a row in 70 years.

[00:16:07]   
I was pretty tight with the dollar. We paid $600 billion down on the national debt.

[00:16:14]   
But you got to know when to invest, when to save, and you can't pretend that all spending is the same. If you look at the candidates plans, the Trump plan is more than twice as expensive as the Harris plan, and it will help weigh less than half the people that the Harris Walsh plan will help, because their plan goes mostly to help already wealthy people and big corporations who both don't need it and won't necessarily invest it in what does work, which is growing the middle class and giving poor folks a chance to work their way into it.

[00:17:03]   
Why aren't we voting for the Democrats? Well, a lot of people say, well, there's been too much inflation. That's right. When Covid happened and the economy of the world shut down, it broke the supply chains. And when the, uh, supply chains are broken, then the demand for goods for a while is much higher than the available supply.

[00:17:28]   
When the demand is here and the supply is here, the price forces a raise.

[00:17:35]   
It happened everywhere in the world.

[00:17:40]   
Now, what happened? The administration, President Biden and all of his economic team and vice President Harris, they've been trying to get the inflation rate down, and it's been going down for three years. And finally, the Federal Reserve has lowered interest rates, which is going to drive it down more.

[00:18:03]   
So there's still some residual inflation that we all have questions about, especially in food prices and fuel prices. Now, here's how that works. If you look at the grocery business nationwide, there are still quite a large number of independent grocery stores, especially in smaller places, but they have to buy from a relatively limited number of suppliers.

[00:18:36]   
And then there's the problem of concentration in larger places, of huge grocery stores, with massive numbers of customers having a big share of the market. They often have what sounds like a low profit margin, three or 4%.

[00:18:57]   
But, uh, if you got millions of customers, you can make a ton of money with that kind of profit margin. And the difference of 1% might be enormous. And all the burden of that 1% might come off people buying meager groceries every week to stay alive. That's why most states have anti price gouging laws.

[00:19:23]   
But we always left it to the states before, and the grocery business has been changing before.

[00:19:29]   
Our very eyes, uh, are getting more and more concentrated, and that's why Kamala Harris became the first presidential candidate ever to say, we need a national price gouging law.

[00:19:42]   
And Bob Casey, the senator from Pennsylvania, has already introduced one. You have them in blue states and red. We might be able to get a big bipartisan vote for this, but we, but we won't get it if they don't get it in the Congress, and we don't have a president standing behind it.

[00:20:10]   
And once the Justice Department has the power to look into these things, prices may start to drop a little bit. Might not ever have to find the lawsuit, because that's the way the world works.

[00:20:24]   
If you think you're free to do whatever you want, it's different than if you have to think about whether the law will come down on you. This is just one example, but, uh, she's in this looking for a practical solution to a big problem for people who are doing their best to run independent grocery stores, and people doing their best to find food for their families at reasonable prices at stores of any size.

[00:21:03]   
And so I hope you will think about that. I hope you'll talk to your neighbors about that. We just started this early voting.

[00:21:12]   
It's not too late to talk to people, but it's crazy for, I think, unfair. I'll back off a crazy. They use that word I too much. It's unfair to pretend that we could have been the only country in the world that would have escaped this inflation problem. And she's actually trying to do something about it.

[00:21:39]   
So that's the first thing. Second thing is she'll help working families. Bye. Another big increase in the earned income tax credit, up, uh, to $3,600 a year.

[00:21:58]   
And I know this will work, and it'll be $6,000 in the first year of a baby's life because there are often problems, health care problems. I know this will work because I doubled it when I was president, and it was the beginning of that. And we started with the first family tax credit, which was only about $500 a child then, but that was back in the dark ages when I served.

[00:22:32]   
But together, those things moved 8 million people and working families from poverty into the middle class. This will work.

[00:22:51]   
And since we started on this road, child poverty has gone down almost 60%. And if we enact what Kamala Harris and Tim Walts want to do, it'll be cut in half again. So the guys on the other side talk a lot about family values, but I think how your children live, eat, get medical care, and handle the responsibilities that they impose upon their parents, I think those were very important family values.

[00:23:43]   
So what does Donald Trump want to do?

[00:23:48]   
His economic plan basically amounts to more tax cuts for the ultra wealthy. He does impose tariffs across the board, and all the surveys show that that's kind of popular because he sounds like he's zapping foreigners. Here's the problem. If you double tariffs on, um, stuff that we don't make here, but you have to buy, all you're doing is raising the price of stuff we have to buy.

[00:24:25]   
Doesn't create any jobs for anybody.

[00:24:27]   
It doesn't start, it's not like the chips bill, where President Biden got the support to start manufacturing computer chips in America for national security and economic reasons. This is just stuff. Anything buying pencils for your kids to go to school with, whatever you do that it amounts to a sales tax on every family.

[00:24:55]   
These tariffs will hurt lower and middle income families the most, because most Americans spend a larger percentage of their income on goods and services, the very things that we don't produce here than others. So the economists say Trumps would cost middle class families about $4,000 a year.

[00:25:20]   
And by raising the price of essentials like gas, medicine, and prescription drugs, which also he wants to do, it will become worse.

[00:25:33]   
Please talk to your friends about that. And then theres the jobs issue. You know, we're about to finish the four year term, which has produced more jobs than any four year term in the history of the United States.

[00:26:06]   
And it's kind of rich hearing Trump talk about how bad the economy is under Biden when he's the only president to lose more jobs than were created since the Great Depression. Now he will complain that's not fair because look at what I had to go through with COVID But he inherited a booming economy and had the great good luck that most voters didn't feel it yet because there's often about a three year lag between when something good or bad happens and when people feel it.

[00:26:45]   
But already before COVID happened, the job growth under Trump was down from President Obama's last two years. So he wants you to believe, like I said before, this is about I, a whole different world started when I took office, and boom, everything got great when, in fact, the job growth was going down.

[00:27:11]   
So Democrats do know how to create jobs.

[00:27:15]   
Since then, since the end of the cold War war, about 51 million new jobs have been created by the private sector, 50 million under the Democrats. Now, if Tim Walts were still out here, he would tell you if you're ahead 50 to one, you're winning.

[00:27:42]   
So if you vote for Tim Walts and Kamala Harris, they'll run up to score even more.

[00:27:57]   
It's the same thing with health care, as I said, that the Republicans, with Donald Trump's support both before and during the time he was president, voted 60 times to repeal the Affordable Care act. Now, he says he still wants to repeal it, but he will replace it with concepts of a plan.

[00:28:27]   
Meanwhile, you got to pay the healthcare bills. I mean, if I came to you with concepts of a plan, you'd tell me to take a hike.

[00:28:38]   
Concepts of a plan meant you're going to lose the protections for pre existing conditions. You're going to lose much of the freedoms that we have and the options we have. And I don't care what they say, they are coming after the right to choose. If they winden what's going to happen?

[00:29:09]   
The limits on insulin pricing will be gone. The $2,000 limit a year for seniors will be gone. Harris and Waltz want to get rid of the age limit and bring those limits down to other people. We know that a lot of these people are selling medicine for astronomically more than it costs them to make it.

[00:29:39]   
So if you want to spend more for less, pay more for prescription drugs, take the safety net away, create a more calamitous world for you and your family, you got a good choice there.

[00:29:59]   
Trump is waiting for you.

[00:30:04]   
Now, look, don't take all this from me. Oh, he's just being so partisan. Look at his own vice president, members of his cabinet, prominent republican members of Congress, military leaders, well over 100 people who ran his own administration who will not endorse him because they say Kamala Harris will honor the constitution and give us a good, normal life and build on our strengths, and he will not.

[00:30:48]   
He wants four more years of chaos, four more years of the blame game.

[00:30:55]   
We want a leader who will take us, uh, to buckle down, to solve problems, to seize the opportunities, to give us a stronger middle class with greater ability for more people to work their way into it.

[00:31:16]   
We want to do things, and we're tired of wasting time talking about crowd sizes.

[00:31:26]   
We want more affordable housing, more affordable health care. You heard what Governor Walsh said about the housing. More affordable childcare, more financing for small businesses, stronger alliances for freedom and democracy around the world, including in Ukraine.

[00:32:01]   
We want peace in the Middle east that secures Israel's future and gives the Palestinians a right to a homeland.

[00:32:14]   
That's what we want.

[00:32:18]   
We want to lead through cooperation. And we not too interested in hearing about the great late Hannibal Lecter or the very real wishes of, uh, President Putin and the president of North Korea. Folks, this is. It's dangerous. I'm not.

[00:32:42]   
We're all having fun. I want you to have a good time, but this is really serious.

[00:32:50]   
Here's what I know. For 250 years now, we have always been divided. Benjamin Franklin's only son was the royal governor of New Jersey and was never reconciled with his father. You can't get over every conflict, but we got a constitution which specified how they were all going to be handled and basically could be subtitled let's make a deal.

[00:33:28]   
Majority rule, minority rights, individual rights, the rule of law, and all of us living under the same rules. Somehow we've kept hope alive. We've kept marching together.

[00:33:45]   
We should not despair about these divisions. We have to do something about it. We have to.

[00:34:00]   
That's the chance we've got again. Now, we ought to reach out a hand to our neighbors, those that agree with us and those who don't. But we should realize that more than ever before in my lifetime, the fundamental protections of the economy, of the constitution, majority rule, minority rights, individual rights, the rule of law.

[00:34:29]   
Same set of rules define everybody. Those m things are in great danger.

[00:34:36]   
And I'm telling you, I think it is an enormous opportunity that, uh, we've been given to elect Kamala Harris.

[00:34:54]   
She is clearly up for the job. Tim Walts is clearly up to the job. They will bring us together and move us forward. Will everything be perfect overnight? Will everything be hunky dory?

[00:35:07]   
Will you agree with everything they do? No. This is the real world. But you seldom. You seldom get a chance to do as much good for as many people with one decision.

[00:35:22]   
So go out there and win this, because your country needs you, your families need you, future generations need you. So starting today, haul those people to one stop early voting and take advantage of the chance to vote early and then spend the rest of the time, all the way to the election day, taking other people to the polls.

[00:36:00]   
This election, a lot of people need a plan to vote. They need help voting. We have so much hay in the barn.

[00:36:14]   
There is not another country on the face of this earth that is better positioned for the next 20 years than the United States. Not one.

[00:36:29]   
We've been through so much turmoil, so much trouble. We've still got some people with PTSD from COVID This has been tough on people. You gotta take a deep breath and push this thing over the finish line. I'm telling you, you can do it. So thank you on behalf of, um, my grandchildren and yours, if you have them.

[00:37:01]   
There's a lot on the line. So far, for more than 250 years, everybody that's bet against America has lost money.

[00:37:17]   
Do nothing. Don't let them down. Don't let the future down. Don't let the kids down. Don't let the prospect that we actually might learn to live together and learn from each other and have fun again with our differences instead of being killing each other over.

[00:37:37]   
You can do it, and I think you will. Bless.