Bill Clinton's DNC speech Page #2

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Now, meanwhile, let's get back to business. I was trying to convince her to marry me.

(LAUGHTER)

I first proposed to her on a trip to Great Britain, the first time she had been overseas. And we were on the shoreline of this wonderful little lake, Lake Ennerdale. I asked her to marry me and she said I can't do it.

(LAUGHTER)

So in 1974 I went home to teach in the law school and Hillary moved to Massachusetts...

(APPLAUSE)

...to keep working on children's issues. This time trying to figure out why so many kids counted in the Census weren't enrolled in school. She found one of them sitting alone on her porch in a wheelchair. Once more, she filed a report about these kids, and that helped influence ultimately the Congress to adopt the proposition that children with disabilities, physical or otherwise, should have equal access to public education.

(APPLAUSE)

You saw the results of that last night when Anastasia Somoza talked.

(APPLAUSE)

She never made fun of people with disabilities; she tried to empower them based on their abilities.

(APPLAUSE)

Meanwhile, I was still trying to get her to marry me.

(LAUGHTER)

So the second time I tried a different tack. I said I really want you to marry me, but you shouldn't do it.

(LAUGHTER)

And she smiled and looked at me, like, what is this boy up to? She said that is not a very good sales pitch. I said I know, but it's true. And I meant it, it was true.

I said I know most of the young Democrats our age who want to go into politics, they mean well and they speak well, but none of them is as good as you are at actually doing things to make positive changes in people's lives. (APPLAUSE)

So I suggested she go home to Illinois or move to New York and look for a chance to run for office. She just laughed and said, are you out of you mind, nobody would ever vote for me.

(LAUGHTER)

So I finally got her to visit me in Arkansas.

(APPLAUSE)

CLINTON:
And when she did, the people at the law school were so impressed they offered a teaching position. And she decided to take a huge chance. She moved to a strange place, more rural, more culturally conservative than anyplace she had ever been, where she knew good and well people would wonder what in the world she was like and whether they could or should accept her.

Didn't take them long to find out what she was like. She loved her teaching and she got frustrated when one of her students said, well, what do you expect, I'm just from Arkansas. She said, don't tell me that, you're as smart as anybody, you've just got to believe in yourself and work hard and set high goals. She believed that anybody could make it.

(APPLAUSE)

She also started the first legal aid clinic in northwest Arkansas, providing legal aid services to poor people who couldn't pay for them. And one day I was driving her to the airport to fly back to Chicago when we passed this little brick house that had a for sale sign on it. And she said, boy, that's a pretty house. It had 1,100 square feet, an attic, fan and no air conditioner in hot Arkansas, and a screened-in porch.

Hillary commented on what a uniquely designed and beautiful house it was. So I took a big chance. I bought the house. My mortgage was $175 a month.

(LAUGHTER)

When she came back, I picked up her up and I said, you remember that house you liked? She said yeah. I said, while you were gone I bought it, you have to marry me now.

(LAUGHTER)

The third time was the charm.

(APPLAUSE)

We were married in that little house on October the 11th, 1975. I married my best friend. I was still in awe after more than four years of being around her at how smart and strong and loving and caring she was. And I really hoped that her choosing me and rejecting my advice to pursue her own career was a decision she would never regret.

A little over a year later we moved to Little Rock when I became attorney general and she joined the oldest law firm west of the Mississippi. Soon after, she started a group called the Arkansas Advocates for Families and Children.

(CHEERS)

It's a group, as you can hear, is still active today.

(APPLAUSE)

In 1979, just after I became governor, I asked Hillary to chair a rural health committee to help expand health care to isolated farm and mountain areas. They recommended to do that partly by deploying trained nurse practitioners in places with no doctors to provide primary care they were trained to provide. It was a big deal then, highly controversial and very important.

And I got the feeling that what she did for the rest of her life she was doing there. She just went out and figured out what needed to be done and what made the most sense and what would help the most people. And then if it was controversial she'd just try to persuade people it was the right thing to do.

(APPLAUSE)

It wasn't the only big thing that happened that spring my first year as governor. We found out we were going to be parents.

(APPLAUSE)

And time passed. On February 27th, 1980, 15 minutes after I got home from the National Governors Conference in Washington, Hillary's water broke and off we went to the hospital. Chelsea was born just before midnight.

(APPLAUSE)

And it was the greatest moment of my life. The miracle of a new beginning. The hole it filled for me because my own father died before I was born, and the absolute conviction that my daughter had the best mother in the whole world.

(APPLAUSE)

For the next 17 years, through nursing school, Montessori, kindergarten, through T-ball, softball, soccer, volleyball and her passion for ballet, through sleepovers, summer camps, family vacations and Chelsea's own very ambitious excursions, from Halloween parties in the neighborhood, to a Viennese waltz gala in the White House, Hillary first and foremost was a mother.

She became, as she often said, our family's designated worrier, born with an extra responsibility gene. The truth is we rarely disagreed on parenting, although she did believe that I had gone a little over the top when I took a couple of days off with Chelsea to watch all six "Police Academy" movies back-to-back.

(LAUGHTER)

When Chelsea was 9 months old, I was defeated for reelection in the Reagan landslide. And I became overnight, I think, the youngest former governor in the history of the country. We only had two-year terms back then.

Hillary was great. Immediately she said, OK, what are we going to do? Here's what we're going to do, we're going to get a house, you're going to get a job, we're going to enjoy being Chelsea's parents. And if you really want to run again, you've got to go out and talk to people and figure out why you lost, tell people you got the message and show them you've still got good ideas.

I followed her advice. Within two days we had a house, I soon had a job. We had two fabulous years with Chelsea. And in 1982, I became the first governor in the history of our state to be elected, defeated and elected again.

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