have you ever listened to a bill clinton speech and said oh-oh, he might be going too long. i don t because i enjoy it. i think one thing you saw president clinton had a great time doing it. he speem seemed to enjoy it. he really enjoyed it. but you don t think it is going long because he kept hitting issue after issue. had people laughing, people almost crying. so he just makes it a great speech. nobody can distill these big issues down and get them into that living room like bill clinton can do. there was one issue, we haven t heard on the campaign trail a lot. that he brought up tonight. that was medicaid cuts. has this been an issue he s been trying to get the obama administration to talk about more? first when you ask president clinton to give a speech, he is going to talk about what he thinks is important. he s been in contact. he talks about medicaid cuts and this is a big deal for president clinton. these cuts to the people most in need in america today. and i thi
case for their actual record of their policies going forward. what was striking to me about tonight, paul ryan was supposed to be that guy for them. that was how he came up in republican politics. that s what they saw in him. and he wasn t dispatched to do that at the republican national convention. the democratic convention, they ve dispatched clinton to do that. and my understanding of obama s speech tomorrow is that it will be very, very policy centric. you ve seen a real reliance from policy from the democrats at this convention. it was simply not matched by the republicans. the democrats saw it as an opening they could define what the way forward was. with clinton in particular, they took it. i think we saw that tonight in both of the big speeches tonight. both from clinton and from elizabeth warren who also did a lot of specific policy talking in her speech while getting a huge response from the crowd. one other thing i wanted to ask you about, ezra, one of the earliest numbere
republicans beat on the quality of speakers. it s not even close. let s bring in lawrence o donnell, lawrence, tell us your experience of the speech, what you saw there. reporter: rachel, i think one of the concerns the obama team has to have is what was the effect of the speech outside of this hall, where it went more than a half hour longer than it was scheduled to go. it was one of those clinton tests of a television audience attention span. he used to do this sometimes with state of the union addresses that many of us thought went too long, but then, on bill clinton s longest state of the union address when the pundit opinion was unanimous that it had gone far too long and he had lost the audience, he got his biggest poll jump ever from a state of the union address which was the longest one he ever gave. we ve got and tonight we have the competing elements, right, of when the networks are going to be taking the feed. supposedly 10:00 to 11:00, and it s supposedly, therefore
wherever joe goes, he s a regular joe. he speaks their language. he has good connectivity that people like. all this trumped up activity about him being on the ticket, hillary and all this right wing stuff. they know how effective joe biden is. he has been a real good strong, confident voice in the president s ear when it comes to foreign policy. that was one of the reasons why he was put on the ticket. no one right now can argue with the foreign policy success that s president obama has had. so joe biden is solid. i don t think they re going to be holding him back at all. the right has caricatured joe biden in a way that they have set expectations very, very low. not just for the speech tomorrow night, which is less important. all eyes will be on the president but particularly for that debate on the right. you saw the glee. i can t wait until paul ryan destroys joe biden. i can t wait for the debate for a lot of reasons. not because i think it will be one-sided. and it is one-sided,
lot of republicans saying this, oh, he s a good democrat. just like you heard democrats say after ronald reagan passed away, oh, back when ronald reagan he was a good republican. but you look at hillary and bill and you go from 93/ 94 when it was the middle these guys have progressed to a this new place nobody would have imagined. the good democrat that republicans admire who did the biggest tax increase in history. and you ve got without a single republican vote. and who then went on a health care crusade in which there was a conscience, conscience choice made to not try to get any republican votes which is part of why the whole thing collapsed. so there was this notion, the compromise was great and it s necessary, but there wasn t really that much of it during the clinton administration. as that speech would have suggested. he couldn t stand up there and say, here s all the models of where i compromised successfully