Davis — Former President Bill Clinton — aka the Secretary of Explaining Stuff — was the reason that many in the crowd of 8,000 massed in the UC-Davis main quad Tuesday, as we noted in our story in Wednesday’s Chronicle. The point of the exercise — politically, that is — came at the very end, when Clinton posed for individual grip-and-grin shots with each of the four Dems facing tough races: Reps. Jerry McNerney and John Garamendi, and challengers Jose Hernandez and Ami Bera.
No, Clinton didn’t do any fundraisers for those guys, but that image will soon be coming to mailboxes across the Central Valley. As Nathan Gonzales, an analyst with the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report told us, “Bill Clinton is one of those politicians that candidates don’t mind standing next,too.” Obama, on the other hand, might be seen as a bit too liberal for parts of some of those districts.
For those in the audience who couldn’t name any of those House candidates, they were treated to a 30-minute version of Bubba’s Greatest Hits Show — complete with a few ol’ faves from his DNC speech. But he did riff off a new one about the Republicans claiming –without one shred of evidence, as we pointed out the other day — that the Dems were cooking the jobs numbers to get them down to 7.8 percent unemployment.
To paraphrase Jon Stewart said, if you’re going to cook the books, wouldn’t you cook the numbers down a little lower than 7.8 percent? Here’s President Clinton, courtesy of San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate.com’s Shaky Hand Productions:
And here’s Garamendi — who served in Clinton’s cabinet in the Interior Department — talking about what Clinton’s endorsement means: