As the zen saying goes 'the journey is the destination'. At about 2:00pm my office partner said "I hear Bill Clinton is going to speak at UC Davis tonight", which in turn sent me buzzing. I wrote some e-mails to friends I thought might enjoy it (no response), I called my wife, she said "you can go, but I don't feel like it", I asked the kids (yeah whatever, rather play 'Rock Band'), I called my office partner, he said "I'm too lazy". So it was just going to be me (and a couple thousand friends I just hadn't met yet). After getting home from work, and helping a bit with household chores, I ate dinner, tried to figure out some clues on find 815 (see Lostpedia for more info; Warning it is highly addictive), and it was almost time to go. The speech was set to start at 9:00 and the paper recommended arriving at 8:15, at 7:45 I started what I expected to be a 30 min trip to UC Davis. My first mistake was to just print my directions from google maps. My map very clearly put my destination in the Southeast corner of the University.
I knew my plans were going awry when I saw the closed gate across the road my printout said to go. I figured I still had plenty of time (I've seen Bill Clinton twice and both times he didn't start speaking until an hour after scheduled). I parked the car and set off on what I assumed would be a short walk. As I walked along the UC campus I saw lots of study halls and student housing but no 'Pavilion'. As I was walking I saw a group of three students outside smoking (?) so I asked them directions (as you can see I was getting a little desperate). They basically said that I was just about as far away as I could be from my destination and still be on the Campus. I didn't really believe them (they smoked ciggarettes what could they know), but I walked in the direction they suggested. There were very few people out, it was late and dark, and the women gave me a look (like they were getting their pepper spray ready). As I walked I remembered that my (lazy)office partner had gone to UC Davis, so I called him and he confirmed what those smokers had said. When I arrived at the building the line seemed enormous. I made my way to the back of it and I saw another line, people were leaving our line and going to the other. Some people were simply disapearing, walking around a corner and never heading back. After seeing how long my line was and curious about what was going on I headed around the corner as well. There I found a set of closed doors, it appears that people inside had opened these doors to let some people in, but of course I was too late security was now ensuring the doors stayed shut. When I turned around I saw quite a site - there was only one line - and it was enormous, it wound around a soccer field and then around the basketball stadium. There was no way the people at the end of the line were going to get in. I walked as close to the front of the line as I could and went into the event (I'm not proud of cutting in line) inside the security was much more lax than it had been for my previous Bill Clinton experiences (no metal detectors, no pat downs, they checked bags but not pockets, etc.), I guess ex-president is a bit different from president. They had some good local politicians, some of whom may have waited for this event to announce their support for Hillary. Bill covered four main topics, Energy/Global Warming, Education, Foreign Affairs, and Hillary.
I was surprised that Bill put Energy policy at the top of the list, I don't know if either of the Clintons had explicitly said that Energy Policy and the Threat of Global Warming would be Hillary's top priority. Bill also talked about Global Warming in fairly harsh terms - which I found refreshing after so many years of unrealistically optomistic projections in the MSM. If you've heard Bill speak, you know he likes statistics, this part of the speech was rather light on them what I can remember: 2 years ago oil was $60/bbl and oil cos got a huge tax cut : Hillary would reverse the cut and use the money to fund renewables.
It was a college crowd so the talk was a bit heavy on Education (Though Bill said he would give the same talk to any group. This part was classic Clinton (Students in the top 25% of their class with family incomes in the bottom 25% do more poorly than students in the bottom 25% of their class with family incomes in the top 25%)(Students who complete 2 or more years after high school have a greater than 50% chance of having increasing wages throughout their career, students with less education have a less than 50% chance at rising wages)(Hillary wants to cap the repayment amounts to a percentage of income, and forgive loans to students who work as Nurses, Firemen, Police).
Bill talked a lot about 'building a more perfect union' and what America's responsibilities around the world are to reduce poverty and suffering. He talked about his organization and providing AIDS medicine in the developing world. He talked about Blackwater, and how we could get two trained military personnel for the price of one Blackwater employee and still have $5000 left over. When he said this was due to this administrations fixation on privitization whether it made sense or not I felt like I was the only one applauding (Oh well).
He gave a very warm biography of Hillary. He talked about the work she had done on children's issues, and the more lucrative positions she could have pursued. He said how if he had a difficult job and could take any one person to work with, he would choose Hillary (I had to chuckle when the two other options he mentioned were 80+ year old Nelson Mandela and the late Isreali PM Rabin) {I too would take Hillary over the Octagenarian and the dead guy}. At the end he shook a lot of hand (not mine) and signed a bunch of stuff (not mine) and then security kicked us out of the building.
misc. The Band was great - they should have skipped the warm up speeches - and just had the band play for 40 min. One of the Assemblywomen said that women like Hillary had broken the glass ceiling and that the students there wouldn't have to deal with that (I don't know what world she is living on, I want to go there). Bill was very generous with praise for all the candidates (he listed work that he had done with each of them Dodd-FMLA ; Biden-100,000 police officers ; Richardson-UN,Energy ; as well as campaigning with Obama and Edwards. He did talk about surprises that come up in a presidency - and I know he has been criticized for it - it seemed like common sense to me (I think all three would do fine in an emergency).