June 7, 2008
By Jessica Van Sack
Hours before his wife was scheduled to end her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, former President Bill Clinton was officially off the stump as he appeared at the Wang Theatre to promote the City Year volunteer program last night.
“It’s one thing to talk about change and another thing to make it,” Clinton said in a speech that lacked any direct reference to the hotly contested Democratic race but that was threaded with the election’s most bandied about buzzword - change.
Clinton admitted he was tired after having been to “300 communities since March.”
Speaking before hundreds of the nonprofit’s members who were in town for its annual three-day convention, Clinton, 61, delivered a whirlwind summation of the world’s ills and listed a litany of statistics - on everything from global climate change to gas prices to the economy.
“There will be more than a lot for you to do for a very long time,” Clinton told the corps of youth service workers.
He railed against disparities in wealth, saying 90 percent of nationwide resources go to 10 percent of the U.S. population. “You cannot sustain a just society and a vibrant democracy with that kind of inequality,” Clinton said.
The two-term president closed with an anecdote that may have hinted at presumptive Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama.
Clinton described delivering a rousing speech before an audience of a million people in Ghana about a decade ago. “It was 100 degrees, so I had the illusion people were swooning over my words,” Clinton said.
But the speech was overshadowed, he said, by an encounter he would have in the country years later when a woman followed him onto a tarmac in 2001 to express her gratitude for an aid program that helped her land a job at a shirt factory.
Said Clinton, “That’s real change.”