Bill Clinton greets Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper Tuesday at the Clinton Global Initiative in downtown Denver. (Photo by Kathryn Scott Osler/The Denver Post)
Anybody here from out of town? Former President Bill Clinton might as well have dropped the comedian’s icebreaker at the Clinton Global Summit in downtown Denver this week. His best lines during the three-day event aimed at solutions to America’s problems were gentle elbows to his hosts in a swing state that could help decide his wife’s fate as a presidential candidate.
Gov. John Hickenlooper, a fellow Democrat and Clinton friend, from the former commander in chief on the main stage Tuesday morning. It was Colorado pot’s turn on Wednesday.
Honored to welcome to Colorado & get mocked by for wearing a suit
— John Hickenlooper (@hickforco)
Hick’s is apparently known in the highest reaches of power and politics.
“I want to thank Gov. Hickenlooper,” Clinton said in a wind up to his pitch. “He always impressed me how he could be so substantive and issue-oriented and so informal.
“And I felt almost guilty that he felt constrained to wear a suit today.”
People laughed. Colorada Democrats probably laughed the hardest, for it’s a rare moment when Hickenlooper is upstaged on witty quips.
“We are delighted to bring together so many passionate thinkers and doers,” Colorado’s governor told the crowd of about 1,000 in the Grand Ballroom at the Sheraton Downtown Denver Hotel Tuesday.
He did, however, reference Monday night’s festivities around STEM education, calling it “an evening of mind-bending trivia and beer education.”
Extending the economic reovery to more people, however, “is a subject we’re even more passionate about in Colorado than beer,” Hickenlooper said.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told Clinton during a one-on-one discussion on stage Wednesday that more people are turning to locally or regionally grown foods, which is good news for farm communities.
“Now with the exception of the state of Colorado and a few other states that legalized another product, there are not many commodities you can plant” in urban areas, Vilsack said.
Clinton apparently has inhaled conversations around the subject matter of Colorado’s latest cash crop.
“Dear Lord, that’s all I need, one more story,” Clinton said as the laughter began to rumble across the room. “If only the marijuana growers would invite me to give a speech.”
Clinton also joked about his aversion to e-mails in the early days of the World Wide Web.
“I’ve found people have said embarrassing things on email and I didn’t want to be one of them,” he said, a bit tone-deaf to his wife’s current e-mail problems.
Fox News took the quote out of context to present an inconsistency between the remark and Hillary Clinton saying some of the private e-mails she hasn’t produced for Benghazi investigators were exchanges between her and her husband.
That inconsistency only works, though, if you leave out the context of what Bill Clinton said just before the joke, : “One of the changes that was largely unnoticed when I was in office was the dramatic increase in the number of people who were making a living working out of their homes, huge, by the millions.”
In the March, a political blog the Wall Street Journal, another Rupert Murdoch-owned operation, who said the former president rarely uses e-mail.
