![]() The thing Clinton does better than anything else is read the room." ![]() "Clinton is so adept at reading the room. "People who had known him for a long time in Arkansas knew that he was an extraordinarily gifted speaker," Riley said. Getting people to forget that speech wasn’t overly hard for Clinton. All of his subsequent policy speeches were shorter and more focused, written with an eye toward erasing the public’s memory of that 1988 disaster. A 1988 Associated Press report described Clinton as having "gone from the media doghouse to media darling in one short week":Īnd all it took was a smile, a few self-deprecating jokes and a song.Cable News Network on Friday cited the governor for the "fastest turnaround ever" on its weekly "Winners and Losers."Ĭlinton plotted his next moves carefully. I talked to Freddie de Cordova, who was of course Carson's producer, and he says Carson has never had a politician on his show in his entire career and he's not going to now.Īnd I said, okay, and so sometime after lunch I thought of another idea and I just called Freddie de Cordova back direct and I said, okay, you've never had a politician on, but what if he comes on and plays the saxophone? This guy's a musician, and de Cordova says, laughed, and he said I'll get back to you, let me go down the hall and talk to Johnny, you know.Īnd so, half hour later called and he said, ok, he's on the show next Thursday night and he's got to play the saxophone and I said, sure, he's gonna do it, we'll have him here.Ĭlinton sat down with Carson, and with the first question Carson put an hourglass on the table. In an interview on PBS’s American Experience, Thomason recalls the story: If something happened on Carson’s show, it permeated American culture. ![]() "Johnny Carson was viral before there was viral," Riley said. But the day after the disastrous convention speech, Harry Thomason, Clinton’s close friend and television producer and director, knew Clinton had to be the first. In 1988, no politician had ever been on The Late Show With Johnny Carson. So how did he go from the laughingstock of the 1988 convention to the 1992 Democratic presidential nominee? Riley credited a subsequent appearance on the most popular late-night talk show of the time, The Late Show With Johnny Carson, with saving Clinton's career.īill Clinton saved his political future with a late-night talk show and a saxophone that he might have put himself out of contention for any political future," recalls Russell Riley, a professor at University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs and author of two forthcoming books on Clinton.īut surprisingly, Clinton went on to become the 42nd president of the United States - and is now headlining this year’s convention as the husband of the Democratic nominee. It seems Bill Clinton has overstayed his welcome." " has gone on so long that he has completely lost this crowd. Clinton," Chris Wallace, then of NBC, said from the convention floor. "I can tell you that this place is just ready to explode and I think they are long past the period of listening to Gov. It was a bad moment - and at the time, many thought it would sink Clinton’s budding political career. The speech was so poorly received that the audience cheered when he said, "In conclusion." ![]() Instead, he spoke an uninspiring 33 minutes, interrupted by boos and chants. Hillary Clinton often says she’s not a natural politician - she gives that honor to her husband, Bill Clinton.īut it’s worth noting that the first substantive time this natural politician got up on a national stage, as the keynote speaker at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, he utterly bombed.Ĭlinton, then a governor from Arkansas and a rising star, was only supposed to speak for 15 minutes on policy before endorsing Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis. ![]()
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