Bill in Keene
I'm reading bits and parts of My Life which I picked up on the way home today. It's 900 pages long, so I truly doubt I'll be able to read all of it any time soon, so I skipped the first 400 pages or so until it got to the 1992 campaign.
I didn't get to see then-Governor Clinton in New Hampshire. God knows why. I was going to college in Keene and was working on the college weekly newspaper and I had the chance to see and talk to more than a few candidates, but I was generally disinterested and eventually chose a Paul Tsongas speech instead of Bill. (I had to transcribe that speech from an old hard-to-manage tape recorder, and I'll tell you I'll never forget Tsongas' voice for the rest of my life.) Yeah, you can chalk that decision up to the regrets of life.
Anyways, from one semester to the next Clinton jumped up in popularity and I got wise, but by January the time for small college speeches were over and I missed my chance to get up close and personal. The picture above was taken the day before the primaries, and he was obviously mobbed.
I did, however, vote for Clinton the next day. It was my first vote ever and I was one of probably less than a hundred thousand people in New Hampshire that helped put Bill on the national map. (He won 29% of the vote, second behind home-town-favorite Tsongas, and became the "Comeback Kid."). There won't be many - if any - votes left in my life that will be as influential, I'm sure.
As for the book, it's not the most compelling thing in the world, but definitely interesting to read. (Are autobiographies just after-the-fact weblogs?) So far he just seems to be going through meticulously all the events in his life. I mean, 400 pages to get to the presidential campaign?!?! Come on! Hopefully things will get a little more in depth once I get to the part where he becomes President. I don't think I realized how good we had it in the 1990s, so I'm curious about many of the events that I just glazed over while flitting about in my 20s...
:-)
-Russ