Clinton stumps for favorite candidate

Former President Clinton began and ended a speech in Las Vegas on Monday night pretending not to be married to the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"What I want you to know is, if she asked me to do this and we'd never been married, I would be here tonight," Clinton told a cheering crowd at the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy on West Lake Mead Boulevard.

And again at the end of the speech: "I'd be here if we weren't married, and I hope you will all be there in January 2009 to celebrate a new day for America."

Joking that he felt like "an old horse that has won a lot of races, and every two years they take me out of the stable to see if I can still run," Bill Clinton said he wanted to make a substantive, positive case for his wife without disparaging the other candidates.

"In the 40 years that I have been voting, when I vote for her next year, she is the best qualified, best suited nonincumbent I have ever voted for," the former president said in a campaign stop for New York Sen. Hillary Clinton.

"I didn't mind them jumping all over Hillary," he said, referring to the Democratic debate last week that amounted to a match between her and the rest of the field. "She said, 'When a lady gets to be 60, it's nice to have all these boys paying attention to you.' ... She answered the charges, but she didn't say anything bad back, and I like that too."

More than 3,000 people came to hear the former president speak at the free event, according to the campaign. Andre Agassi, who created the charter school for underprivileged kids, introduced Clinton, but a spokesman said the tennis great, who is active in Democratic politics, has not endorsed a presidential candidate.

Hillary Clinton's campaign announced Monday that she has, however, been endorsed by longtime Strip headliners Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn; former Clark County Manager Thom Reilly, now a Harrah's executive; and Las Vegas Constable Robert "Bobby G" Gronauer.

Before his speech at the Agassi school, Bill Clinton made a surprise visit to a contingent of Culinary union members engaged in negotiations, then gave a speech at a national postal workers' union convention at the Las Vegas Hilton.

In both speeches, each about 40 minutes, Clinton set out what he said are the three major problems facing America and the world. The union speech was lighter on references to Hillary Clinton, but both made the same basic points in the former president's laid-back style. Jokes about getting older were interspersed with policy details.

The three problems, Clinton said, are inequality in income, health care and education; global warming; and what he termed both terrorism and "identity conflicts."

"Our common humanity is more important than our interesting differences," he said. "But just a few people who disagree with that can do a whole lot of damage."

Al-Qaida, he said, represents "the extreme example of identity: I'm right, you're wrong; you disagree with me, you ought to die."

Any shot at the current president is an automatic applause line with a Democratic audience. But rather than taking the easy ovation, Clinton gently deflected an audience member's suggestion that President Bush be included in his list of global problems.

"Yeah, Bush and Cheney," he said. "I could sit here all night and make you laugh and cry and stand up and cheer talking about the president and the vice president. But the country is over that. Let's get the show on the road again."

He referred self-deprecatingly to his role in the campaign, telling the local audience, "I love being Hillary's surrogate," while at the union speech he praised an audience member's "Bill Clinton for First Lady" T-shirt.

Hillary, he said, would be the president most able to quickly restore America's international standing and strengthen a beleaguered military. She would be able to work with Republicans to get things done, he said, and has a long record of working on health care and education issues.

And, he said, "you ought to be for her because she can win." Obliquely addressing the oft-repeated notion that Hillary is too divisive to win a general election, Clinton told of "old redneck guys" in upstate New York who never thought they'd support a Democrat but have been converted by Hillary's work on their behalf.

A college friend who doesn't always support Democrats, Clinton said, wants to personally campaign for Hillary because "he said, I'm sick and tired of what they say about her, all this criticism. They don't know her. I never met a single person who knew her that did not like her and respect her.'"

In both speeches Clinton told listeners to brace for a Republican smear campaign, warning the local crowd of the "reverse plastic surgery" that her opponents would attempt to do.

With the union audience, he was more explicit, referring to the Swift Boat Veterans ads opposing Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and an ad that helped depose veteran and triple amputee Max Cleland from the Senate in Georgia by portraying him alongside Saddam Hussein.

"Why am I saying this?" he said. "Because I had a feeling at the end of the last debate that we're going to get into cutesy land again."

Hillary is still taking heat for not giving a straightforward answer to a question about driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. Her Democratic opponents have accused her of not wanting to take a stand that could hurt her in the general election, and Clinton essentially said that was the case.

Such material, Clinton said, would be used by Republicans to "make an ad that says Democrats are against the rule of law." He added, "I think it's fine to discuss illegal immigration, but not in 30 seconds, yes, no, raise your hand."

Las Vegas resident Dasya Duckworth, 33, said Clinton's speech won her over. Coming into the event at the Agassi school, she "was 65 percent sure" she would support Hillary, "and now I know I do."

Duckworth said she was tiring of all the back-and-forth of this seemingly endless campaign and wished the election could come sooner.

Another audience member, Ydoleena Yturralde, 28, liked that Clinton had concrete things to say about Hillary's candidacy. "He didn't just say, 'Vote for my wife, you should support me because I was there,'" she said. "He actually had significant reasons.

Yturralde works for Las Vegas City Councilman Ricki Barlow, a Hillary supporter, but said she was there of her own accord. "I don't support her because Ricki does," she said. "I support her because I'm a single mom and I believe in her."

Contact reporter Molly Ball at mball@reviewjournal.com or (702) 387-2919.