Watch Clinton speak in HelenaThe Helena woman was so excited to see the former president, she showed up at the Helena High School gymnasium at 12:15 p.m., almost three hours before the notoriously late Clinton was scheduled to speak and five hours before he actually walked onto the stage.
She waited 45 minutes before another Clinton fan came, and together, the two formed the very head of a line of thousands that eventually snaked through the parking lot.
“She's the best change-maker I have ever known,” Clinton told the crowd, adding that he'd be supporting her even if she weren't his wife.
In a 70-minute speech peppered with anecdotes from Hillary Clinton's personal life and key details about the New York senator's policies, Clinton stressed that Hillary is the better choice for the Democratic presidential nomination.
On energy, the former president said Hillary Clinton supports eliminating give-aways for energy companies, and using that money instead to make America energy-independent by investing in wind, solar, biomass and clean coal technology.
Enough wind blows from Texas to Montana, Clinton said, “to electrify America.”
Right now, the nation's electrical transmission lines aren't close enough to those windy areas to make harnessing that energy and selling it viable. Hillary Clinton would change that, the former president said. He also addressed environmental concerns about “clean coal,” or efforts to use coal without producing carbon dioxide, the driver of global warming.
America needs to find ways of making coal clean, he said, because even if this nation stopped burning it today, China is still burning enough to render moot efforts to curtail global warming.
Without dealing with China's coal burning, “the future is toast, literally,” he said.
Clinton also portrayed his wife's energy plan as a way of digging the nation out of an expanding economic decline in which millions of middle-class Americans are slipping into the ranks of poverty.
On education, the former president said, his wife would change No Child Left Behind - a line that garnered huge applause - and focus on finding schools that succeed and duplicating those efforts nationwide.
“We are teaching to the test, and over time we are actually learning less,” he said.
He also stressed what has become a major issue in the Democratic primary: health care. Hillary Clinton's health care plan would require all Americans to buy insurance, but it would also allow people to buy into the same health care plan that federal employees have, the former president said.
“The savings we get would be from cutting (insurance company) administration,” he said, which now consumes 30 cents of every dollar Americans spend on health care.
Clinton ended by saying Hillary Clinton would withdraw troops from Iraq, saying the Iraqi government has delayed making the hard decisions needed for that country to function better because America is so deeply involved.
Clinton came to Helena as part of a blitz of four Montana towns: Havre, Great Falls, Helena and Butte. The president's pitch is in anticipation of the Mansfield-Metcalf dinner this weekend in Butte, Montana's annual Democratic Party gathering.
Hillary Clinton is in a tough race with rival Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who leads both in pledged delegates and in many polls. Both candidates will give speeches at the Butte event this weekend.
Montana has 17 delegates who will vote at the Democratic nominating convention in August.
As is becoming a Clinton campaign norm, Bill Clinton was dispatched to rural Montana because he has a rural sense, the former president said Tuesday, and knows “one end of a horse from the other.”
If the strategy is to excite people by bringing in a former president, it seemed to be working Tuesday in Helena.
“I'm not a Hillary Clinton supporter,” said 19-year-old Duran Caferro, who balanced his 5-month-old son on his lap while waiting for the president. “I like Barack Obama. But in Helena, Montana, you don't get to see presidents very often. We don't get many big politicians.”
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