It was a disaster. People were walking out, making "cutting" gestures with their hands, anything to make him shut up.
I saw that speech, but I didn't tape it, damn it. I did many other speeches at the convention but not that one.
Snip:
Conventions can make stars, as Mario Cuomo knows, or dim them, as Mr. Clinton now knows. The jokes were already rife about the speech, 33-minutes long and less-than-inspiring, that caused delegates to scream ''Wrap it up!'' Democratic officials, who had joked that their giant podium was ''the thing that ate the hall,'' were now clucking about ''the speech that ate Bill Clinton.''
But Mr. Clinton, a Rhodes scholar in his fourth term as Governor who considered running for President himself, was not about to go into what he called ''a deep funk.'' He immediately swung into damage control, trooping around the huge press complex, giving interviews about the rhetorical debacle. With rueful charm, he insisted that Mr. Dukakis loved the speech, and he blamed the restless delegates for stretching it out. ''The yellers,'' he complained, ''took half my speech time.''
