Mother Nature Pivotal in Editing Clinton Speeches

Surprise! President Clinton can give brief speeches. He gave one here that was the shortest of his presidency but not, he said, the shortest of his career.

In each case, nature had something to do with it. For his visit Monday, Louisiana trotted out dark, threatening skies, a chill wind and a half-frozen crowd to a ceremony at the Alexandria airport. The president, who had spent a couple hours coatless at an earlier event, limited his talk to 4 minutes, 42 seconds.

Mercifully short for a president who gave a 1995 State of the Union address that lasted an hour, 21 minutes.

But they weren’t record setters, Clinton told reporters on the way home.

Once, he and Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-Ark.) were dedicating a bridge while Clinton was governor. “It was 105 in the shade,” the president said, and he bet the senator $5 that he would give a shorter speech.

Bumpers spoke for a minute, five seconds. Clinton shut up after 48 seconds and pocketed the $5.

The other wisp of a speech was when a county judge suckered Gov. Clinton into dedicating a road that ended in a rice field. Rice, the president explained, needs lots of water, and water breeds mosquitoes.

But the county judge, he said, “was one of those rare human beings that mosquitoes don’t bite.” The judge talked on and on--Clinton-like, one might say--leaving the governor and the audience “clawing at their cheeks.”

Finally, came Clinton’s turn.

“I went up and I gave the following speech,” he said. “ ‘Folks, if we don’t get out of here, we’re all going to die. If you want to speak to me, I’ll go to that fish place over there and I’ll wait for you. If you reelect me, I’ll get rid of every mosquito in the county.”

Length: 29 seconds. Reelected? Yes.

Clinton disclosed all this when he wandered into Air Force One’s news media section, all excited about the emotional performance of “Messiah” that he had just seen at a Pentecostal church in Alexandria. It was billed as “A Supernatural Music Drama” and featured more than 100 performers and singers, laser lights that crisscrossed the room and rock music that shook the rafters.

The president, a Baptist, sang along, clapped along and rocked along. Asked afterward whether it was his kind of music, the president said, “Oh, yeah.”

He went on stage briefly at the end, and thanked the cast and audience for the “incredible gift you gave us.”

In 1989, he brought his wife and daughter to a performance. “It was magnificent then; it was stunning tonight,” he said.

“My great life adventure with the people of the Pentecostal faith began 19 years ago when I was invited to the encampment in Arkansas,” Clinton said. He told the audience that he had attended Pentecostal camps 13 times in the 16 years he was attorney general and governor and when he was out of office.

“I was trying to think of what I could tell you that would make it clear what all this has meant,” Clinton told reporters later.

He mentioned his defeat for governor in 1980. “I was the youngest former governor in American history,” he recalled. “I had no career prospects. People I had appointed to office would walk across the street to avoid being seen with me because they were afraid it would hurt their future.”

Clinton said: “I was alone.” But he said the Pentecostal ministers were with him at that time and prayed for him.

“You made me not just think, but feel, that my God would look past what I was to what I could be. You made me not just think, but feel, that my faith could make me whole. And that is a great gift.”