President Clinton’s Virtuoso Performance
Former President Clinton held the attention of Americans around the country for nearly an hour last night, providing powerful frames for thinking about the choice (On your own society or We are in this together society), responding point by point to the frequently fact checked (and found wanting) charges made at the RNC convention, and like no other explaining complex policies in everyday language we can all understand.

If you missed this speech you absolutely should watch it today.

Steve Schmidt, Republican Party strategist had this to say about the speech:

“Extraordinary.  A virtuoso performance….  Amazing.  I was struck by the political genius of how he embraced the Bush family for the purposes of marginalizing House Republicans and pushing them to the extreme.  It was a devastating critique delivered with an absence of malice or anger, with a smile on his face and with logic, aimed squarely at the middle of the electorate.”

Both Politifact and the original (and still most respected) fact checkers at the Annenburg School found that while Republicans will find Clinton’s claims objectionable, “with few exceptions, we found his stats checked out.”  As usual, in my view, these two sites do the best job of digging behind the claims and when they both agree that is a good sign.