Bill Clinton opened his address to the Democratic National Committee with a simple story: “I met a girl.”
The former US president took a journey down memory lane, describing how he met Hillary Clinton – who’s now the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee – as a law student at Yale University in 1971.
He then told the thousands of delegates at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia about the first time they met.
Bill Clinton is using his address to tell delegates anecdotes of Hillary Clinton’s early years and work before the couple entered public life.
Hillary had walked up to him and told him that if he was going to stare at her, he ought to know her name. Clinton had said he finally asked her to walk to an art museum. He said, “We’ve been walking and talking and laughing together ever since.”
Three marriage proposals later, Hillary said yes. “I married my best friend,” Bill concluded his love story.
‘The Best Darn Change-Maker I Have Ever Known’
In addition to narrating their love story, Bill Clinton portrayed his wife Hillary as a dynamic force for change and a longtime fighter for social justice.
The ex-president told the Democratic Party convention in Philadelphia that Hillary Clinton was “a natural leader” with an in-built sense of responsibility.
Hillary is uniquely qualified to seize the opportunities and reduce the risks we face, and she is still the best darn change-maker I have ever known.
Bill Clinton told the convention in a keynote speech that Hillary had been an activist for social justice since the couple’s early days as law students together. He told how she gave legal aid services to poor people and went undercover to expose a segregationist school in Alabama in the 1970s.
After a tough battle with US Senator Bernie Sanders during the state-by-state nominating contests, Clinton is now the party’s standard-bearer against Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Bill Clinton said Republicans led by Trump had made Hillary out to be “a cartoon” but the real thing was nothing like the their portrayal of her.
They’re running against a cartoon. Cartoons are two-dimensional, they’re easy to absorb. Life in the real world is complicated and real change is hard, and a lot of people even think it’s boring.
Then speaking directly to the crowd, he said to cheers and applause: “Good for you because earlier today you nominated the real one.”
His speech offered an unusual twist to the warm spousal endorsement of a presidential candidate traditionally given in party conventions by a wife, not a man – let alone a former US president.
Watch his full address here:
(With AP and Reuters inputs)
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