By GottaLaff
As it should be:
Two old friends, fresh from a day of mourning in rainy Boston, came south Saturday night to pledge to a roomful of roaring Tennessee Democrats that Ted Kennedy’s dream indeed will never die.
Al Gore and Bill Clinton — ghosts of Democratic victories past who are increasingly showing up to buck up the faithful as President Obama goes through his first real trials in office — were the star guests at the Tennessee Democratic Party’s annual Jackson Day dinner.[...]
Clinton and Gore also offered a skillfully threaded approach that might allow Team Obama to channel the emotion and determination many party activists feel at Kennedy’s loss without spilling over into the kind of raw partisan sentiment that Republicans have warned will trigger a major pushback as an inappropriate attempt to make political hay out of Kennedy’s death.
[Clinton's] message, on a day when Kennedy was remembered as being devoted the least of American society, was that Democrats need to fight. On that, the now silver-haired man from Hope was resoundingly clear.
“You need to back these congressmen and let them know you’re not going to let them be steamrollered by a bunch of people who have been frightened,” Clinton said, in reference to the town hall tumult of the last few weeks. “Don’t let anybody tell you that President Obama wants to ration health care. We are rationing health care in America.”
“I’m not a very good politician any more; I just say what I think,” Clinton said. “But I have been waiting for this for 40 years ... to recreate the American dream.”
Gore, in a much shorter set of remarks, was loose-limbed and noticeably thinner than in recent years — and he seemed to elicit the night’s most emotional moment.
Playing off the focus of the Kennedy funeral on the Gospel of Matthew’s parable of Jesus taking care of “the least of us,” Gore thundered that the country has “a moral duty to pass health care reform. This year.”
TeddyCare. Make the dream come true.
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