Former President Bill Clinton delivers a speech by video feed as Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez watches from the podium during the second day of the Democratic National Convention, being held virtually amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, at its hosting site in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on August 18, 2020. (Photo by BRIAN SNYDER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
(CNSNews.com) – Former President Bill Clinton criticized President Donald Trump’s leadership, in a speech delivered virtually at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night, particularly Trump’s handling of the pandemic.
“A presidential election is the world’s most important job interview. At the end we hire a leader to help us solve problems, create opportunities, and give our kids better tomorrows. That’s a tall order this year, with the COVID-19 outbreak on a path to killing 200,000 people and destroying millions of jobs and small businesses,” Clinton said.
“How did Donald Trump respond? At first he said the virus was under control and would soon disappear. When it didn’t, he was on TV every day bragging on what a great job he was doing, while scientists waited to give us vital information. When he didn’t like the expert advice he was given, he ignored it,” the former president said.
“Only when COVID exploded in even more states did he encourage people to wear masks. By then many more were dying. When asked about the surge in deaths, he shrugged and said, ‘It is what it is,’ but did it have to be this way? No. COVID hit us much harder than it had to,” he said.
Clinton said that the United States has four percent of the world’s population “but 25 percent of the world’s COVID cases.”
“Our unemployment rate is more than twice as high as South Korea’s, 2 1/2 times the United Kingdom’s, and more than three times Japan’s. Donald Trump says we’re leading the world. Well, we are the only major industrial economy to have its unemployment rate triple. At a time like this, the Oval Office should be a command center. Instead, it’s a storm center. There’s only chaos,” he said.
The one thing that changes with Trump is “his determination to deny responsibility and shift the blame,” Clinton said. “The buck never stops there.”
He said the American people have to decide whether to renew Trump’s contract “or hire someone else.”
“If you want a president who defines the job as spending hours a day watching TV and zapping people on social media, he’s your man. Denying, distracting, and demeaning works great if you’re trying to entertain and inflame, but in a real crisis, it collapses like a house of cards. COVID doesn’t respond to any of that. To beat it, you’ve got to go to work and deal with the facts,” Clinton said.
“Our party is united in offering you a very different choice: a go-to-work president. A down-to-earth, get-the-job-done guy. A man with a mission: to take responsibility, not shift the blame; concentrate, not distract; unite, not divide. Our choice is Joe Biden. Joe helped bring us back from a recession before, and he can do it again,” the former president said.
“In 2009, Barack Obama and Joe Biden started with the worst economy since the Great Depression and when they were done, they had delivered more than six straight years of job growth. What did Joe do? He accepted responsibility for implementing the Recovery Act. His work created a lot of new jobs and started many new companies in communities across America. Now Joe is committed to building America back again,” Clinton said.
