Before DNC Speech Tonight, a Look at Bill Clinton's Past Run-Ins With Hecklers
The former president is no stranger to protesters.
— -- It’s Bill Clinton’s big night. The former president will take the stage as the highlighted speaker at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia tonight, after a tense first day marked by heckling and protests.
Bill Clinton cheered on his fellow Democrats from private suites and skyboxes during some of the prime-time speeches Monday night. But the mere mention of Hillary Clinton, his wife and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, riled up clusters of Bernie Sanders supporters who relentlessly booed.
The speakers have largely ignored the heckling, and Bill Clinton may face the same protesters during his speech tonight. He is no stranger to those who disagree with him or badmouth his spouse. In fact, rather than ignore them, he often engages demonstrators, sometimes asking them questions about what they are protesting or even arguing with them.
In April, Bill Clinton had a tense and prolonged exchange with Black Lives Matter protesters at a Hillary Clinton campaign event in Philadelphia. The demonstrators held signs that read “Black youth are not superpredators,” “Clinton’s crime bill destroyed our communities” and “Welfare reform increased poverty.” They continually interrupted the former president, questioning the aftershocks of his 1994 crime bill, which imposed tougher prison sentences and gave money for tens of thousands of police officers and drug courts, among other things. He spent the majority of his speech arguing.
A day later he stopped short of apologizing to the protesters, saying that attacks on his wife are personal for him and he prefers not to talk over people.
“I rather vigorously defended my wife, as I am wont to do, and I realized, finally, I was talking past [a protester] the way she was talking past me. We got to stop that in this country. We got to listen to each other again,” he said to another Pennsylvania crowd.
Coal miners in states like West Virginia and Kentucky have protested at Bill Clinton’s events on the campaign trail. He has directly addressed them during his speeches, acknowledging their grievances, including rapid job loss and epidemic drug addiction. He regularly says Hillary Clinton will be there for the “left out and left behind” if she’s elected president.
The 2016 Democratic National Convention
Supporters of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump have been vocal too. In February a man holding a Trump sign interrupted a Hillary Clinton rally where Bill Clinton was speaking and accused him of taking money from the real estate mogul. Bill Clinton fired back, “I certainly did. I took his money for my foundation and used it better than he’s using it now.”
Bill Clinton got into another heated exchange at a campaign event in February in South Carolina with a man claiming to be a veteran. The protester repeatedly interrupted Clinton’s speech and brought up the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans. Hillary Clinton was the U.S. secretary of state at the time.
The back-and-forth quickly escalated into a shouting match. As security escorted the man and another protester out of the event, Bill Clinton yelled, “Do you have the courage to listen to my answer? Don’t throw him out. If he’ll shut up and listen to my answer, I’ll answer it.”
The next day, Bill Clinton addressed a crowd in Florida and encouraged people to have healthy debate. He claimed that protesters like the those in South Carolina were trained to not let people answer them.
“I let them make their point twice, both of them, and I tried to answer, and they just kept screaming because they were afraid of the answer. We can’t be like that,” he said.
Bill Clinton has admitted to being quite the protester himself back in his college days, which is why he welcomes dissent. However, he has said he expects to be able to speak and explain his positions after protesters make their points.
He may encounter protests yet again tonight — this time from Sanders supporters who are still fuming over internal Democratic National Committee emails released by WikiLeaks that appear to show party officials strategizing how to politically harm the Vermont senator during the primaries. Sanders, who has not technically dropped out of the race, delivered a much-anticipated address at the convention last night that was met by an odd mix of cheers, boos and chants when he said Hillary Clinton “would make an outstanding president.”
Speaking at conventions is nothing new for Bill Clinton, of course. Tonight will be his 10th consecutive convention address.
A party official close to him told ABC News that he is immensely proud of his wife and will be speaking from the heart tonight. He’ll be promoting her days as a child advocacy lawyer, her policy campaigns as first lady and her work as a New York senator, the official said.
An aide told ABC News that Bill Clinton has been working hard writing the speech and is aware of the importance it holds.
“President Clinton is still working on the speech, which he’s writing himself,” the aide said. “He thinks that it’s important for other people to know the secretary as well as he does. So tonight’s speech will very much be a personal one for him.”
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