His wife was across the country at a fundraiser with Bon Jovi. Bernie Sanders was just down the road rallying voters to join his movement. So Bill Clinton stepped up on Wednesday night — sliding comfortably into the role of closer-in-chief.
The former President is known as many things. “The Big Dog.” An effortless political talent. The rare politician who can grip a voter by the shoulders — as he did many times Wednesday night on the rope line — and convince them that he can channel their frustration or pain.
But here in Mason City, he seemed conscious that he had a singular task: to vouch for his wife as the “proven changemaker” who would never “make the perfect the enemy of the good” in a race that has, at times, seemed at risk of slipping from her grasp.
To that end, the former President demonstrated something he is far less known for: message discipline. In a careful speech at a high school gymnasium, he told one tale after another of Hillary Clinton defying the odds to achieve her policy goals, an implicit contrast to her rival who he did not name.
He recounted her trials as a young “lady lawyer” and how she burrowed into Arkansas education standards as the first lady of the state. He described her efforts to get the Children’s Health care Insurance Program into the Balanced Budget Act. He praised her dogged pursuit of unlikely alliances: working on foster care legislation with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay or finding common ground on a military commission with Newt Gingrich.
As he ticked through examples from her resume, he drove home the campaign’s change agent theme no less than a half-dozen times: “She’s a born changemaker and everything she ever touched she made better,” he said.
Later: “All I know is that everything she’s ever touched, she’s made better.”
“Who’s the changemaker here?” he demanded of the crowd at one point.
The former President touched lightly on his own history in Iowa during the 1992 campaign, cheekily thanking those in the crowd who voted for him. He did not mention the couple’s more difficult history with Iowa in 2008 when Barack Obama snatched the victory in the Hawkeye State (though that experience was clearly haunting some of her supporters in the crowd).
But Clinton did try to convince the crowd to engage seriously in the campaign — to look beyond the “entertaining” spectacle of the race and “commit.”
He quoted William Butler Yeats as he described the anxiety and the anger roiling across the country. And in giving his personal testament to how his wife might address it, he told the crowd she had tried to live by the last line of Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite spiritual: “If I can help someone as I travel on, then my living would not be in vain.”
“It took my breath away when I realized 45 years ago that’s really what motivates her,” he said. “She is walking, breathing change agent.”
“We need your help,” he added, asking members of the audience to sign the campaign’s pledge cards (which had already been collected at the door). “We can do this. I am really optimistic.”
For Clinton’s supporters in these final days, optimism stems from campaign’s vaunted ground game, and there were signs of that apparatus at every turn inside the former President’s event. Every single attendee was asked to fill out a sheet expressing their willingness to caucus, or volunteer, or to at least accept caucus reminders via text right as they walked in the door.
Still, some of Clinton’s fans in the crowd were palpably nervous that the race is this tight five days before the caucus. Some winced when asked just how tight it feels on the ground.
“It feels close,” said Jerre Grefe, a nurse who has signed up as a precinct captain for Clinton here.
“We just had a gathering at my house this weekend of all the precinct captains in Franklin County, and among the precinct captains that question came up — ‘How do you think it’s going to roll out’ — and it just went silent.”
She shrugged: “Everybody’s just kind of like, ‘We don’t know.’ ”