Carlisle, Iowa
My camera battery was dead when I caught Bill in West Des Moines last weekend for the piece I did, so I figured it was worth a 20-minute drive last night to snap a few photos. He made pretty much the same pitch as last time, though there was a little more about how George W. Bush had tried to undo everything he'd accomplished--and how Bush had said he was going to do it during the 2000 campaign, only no one was paying attention.
There was also a fun homily about how we can't get tough, trade-wise, with the Chinese and Japanese as long as we're borrowing so heavily from them. "You can't get tough with your banker," Clinton said. "Think about it. ... Suppose January second, you get up, you have breakfast, you drink a cup of coffee, and then you drink an extra cup of coffee to get your blood going. Then you take a leisurely drive down to your local bank. ... Stroll in, walk into the bank president's office, and slap the livin' daylights out of him right there. Think you could get a loan that afternoon?"
--Noam Scheiber