Politics & Power Quote by William J. Clinton

Clinton’s genius here is the double move: validate the grievance, then quietly take custody of it. By opening with “first of all” and praising “really good impulses,” he refuses to treat Tea Party voters as cranks. That’s not kumbaya; it’s tactical. He’s separating the crowd from the candidates, suggesting the base’s anger is legitimate even if the political vehicle is dubious. The line performs a kind of cultural rescue mission: don’t mock the people, redirect them.

The subtext is pure Clinton triangulation, updated for the post-crash era. He translates right-populist rage into a familiar Democratic diagnosis: concentrated wealth and entrenched power win; “ordinary people” don’t. Then he detonates the small phrase that matters most: “That’s true.” It’s a hard stamp of credibility, designed to short-circuit partisan reflexes. If a Democrat says the Tea Party’s core complaint is accurate, the conversation shifts from whether resentment is justified to who actually benefits from channeling it.

Context matters: the Tea Party surge followed the 2008 financial crisis and the bailout politics that made elites look insulated from consequence. Clinton is acknowledging a broadly felt moral imbalance without endorsing the movement’s usual policy targets (government per se, taxes, Obama). He’s implicitly arguing that anti-establishment emotion isn’t the property of the right; it’s a shared American mood. The intent is to reclaim the populist story before it hardens into identity, and to suggest that the real fight isn’t “people vs. government,” but people vs. the networks that capture both markets and the state.