>La Grande Observer | Union and Wallowa Counties' News Leader

Former President Bill Clinton speaks to a crowd of 500 to 600 at the Baker County Courthouse Sunday. Clinton spoke for 55 minutes, detailing Sen. Hillary Clinton’s agenda for the nation. The former president stayed around about 20 minutes to sign autographs, shake hands and pose for pictures. He began the day in Pendleton and went to Redmond after the Baker City event. The Observer/BRYAN PEARSON

Delivered from the steps of the Baker County Courthouse, Clinton’s 55-minute stump speech — in support of his wife, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, who’s waging an uphill fight for the Democratic presidential nomination against Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois — was interrupted more than 30 times by applause.

In trademark fashion, the former two-term president stayed after his speech for more than 20 minutes to work the crowd, sign autographs, shake hands and pose for photographs.

“Aren’t you glad your vote will count? Don’t you think every vote should be counted?” Clinton asked the excited and cheering crowd, a reference to Oregon’s late-in-the-season primary.

This is the first presidential election since 1968 in which either of the major parties’ nomination was not yet decided by the time of Oregon’s primary.

Hillary Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, were in West Virginia campaigning on Mother’s Day, the former president said, in the town where Mother’s Day was first celebrated. West Virginia’s primary is Tuesday.

Bill Clinton, the nation’s 42nd president, served from January 1993 through January 2001. He is, based on records from this newspaper, the first president to visit Baker City since John F. Kennedy came to town in November 1959, before he decided to run for president.

Kennedy was elected in November 1960.

During his speech Sunday Clinton ticked off a long list of reasons why he believes Oregon Democrats should select his wife in the May 20 primary, including:

• The country is poised for change after “seven years of rule by the extreme right wing of the Republican Party,” he said.

“In 2006, Americans gave the Congress back to the Democrats, and in 2008 they’ll give (the presidency) back to the party of the people.”

Both Hillary Clinton and Obama present “compelling visions for change,” Clinton said, but only his wife knows “that the only way for us to get there is through shared prosperity and opportunity.”

Since Clinton left office in 2001, 43 percent of the nation’s added wealth has gone to the wealthiest one percent of Americans, he said.

“That’s worse than a Latin American dictatorship,” he said.

• Her economic plan is the best among the three remaining candidates, including that of Sen. John McCain, the senator from Arizona and the GOP’s presumptive candidate.

The economy has produced just 5 million jobs under President George W. Bush’s economic program, Clinton said — as opposed to the 23 million produced under Clinton’s watch. And too many people, he contends, have slipped from the middle class into poverty despite continuing to work, a trend Clinton labeled “the American nightmare.”

Hillary Clinton plans a public works program — rebuilding the nation’s roads and bridges, for example — that would add 3 million jobs, he said. She’d knock 20 cents per gallon from soaring gas prices by halting the continued filling of the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve. She’d seek legislation to force oil companies to pay the federal gas tax for six months and she’d take a page out of her husband’s foundation’s efforts to make public housing in New York City more energy efficient.

“We’ve got to get around with less oil,” he said. If she’s elected, Hillary Clinton will urge Congress to sell bonds to fund research for high-mileage vehicles to be built in this country, he said.

If that kind of technology becomes affordable and commonplace, “we could tell the oil-producing nations to charge us whatever you want,” he said. The new technology costs $10,000 per vehicle now, but could be made more affordable with federal energy credits.

“It’s worth it to liberate Americans from foreign oil,” he said.

• Hillary Clinton’s health care plan is the only one that will work, he said, because it includes all 300 million Americans.

“No one can bring the economy back if we keep doubling health care costs every seven years,” he said.

Insurance companies spend $50 billion annually “trying not to cover you,” he said, and 30 cents of every health care dollar goes to paperwork.

“Is there any business in town that could stay open blowing 30 percent off the top?” he asked.

Her plan would give every American the same health care plan every member of Congress and federal worker receives, Clinton said, and it would save money in part by creating large, predictable risk pools.

• Her educational views are the “best and clearest” of any candidate, Clinton said.

“No Child Left Behind hasn’t worked and it can’t be made to work,” he asserted. “It was sold to you as a program to achieve international levels of excellence,” but American students are competing against students in other countries who go to school longer, take difficult classes sooner in their educational career and are taught by better-trained and better-paid teachers.

It would be better, he said, to identify 20 exceptional U.S. high schools, middle schools and elementary schools “performing at world-class standards” and emulate their programs, Clinton said.

• The mounting federal deficit, the one area “Hillary is more conservative than George Bush,” he said. For the first time in 70 years, Americans had a negative savings rate in 2007 — households, on average, spent more than they earned.

America is financially beholden to four groups of nations today, he said — China, Japan, South Korea and the world’s oil-producing nations.

“Why do we put up with it? For the same reason you don’t fortify yourself with a cup of coffee in the morning and go down to your local bank and slap the bank president in the face. You might need a loan” in the near future, he said.

All kidding aside, he said his wife will work toward a balanced federal budget, “and that’s a very, very big deal for the young people in this audience.”

• Ending U.S. involvement in Iraq. “To be credible, we have to bring our soldiers home,” he said. “It’s time. No one wants Iraq to fail,” he said, but it’s time for that war-torn nation to make some difficult decisions.

The U.S. military is so thin right now that Navy reservists are being trained in Army infantry tactics, he said, and soldiers’ mental health problems following their “second, third and fourth tours of duty” pose an expensive and difficult challenge back home.