Go to the mobile version of this Web site.

Login | Contact Us | Site Map | Paid archives | Electronic edition | Subscription Questions | Extras

Hillary in Denver: Big Head Todd and promises of change

'I want us to believe,' she tells crowd at Metro

Chris Barge, Rocky Mountain News

Published October 24, 2007 at midnight

Text size  

More Airlines & Aerospace

More stories »

The Hillary Clinton with the high negative ratings, the polarizing former first lady who even some Democrats worry might drag down the rest of the ticket if nominated for president, didn't show up in Denver on Tuesday.

Instead, a comfortable, smiling, crowd-inspiring Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived 15 minutes early on the outdoor stage at Metropolitan State College.

Granted, she had to reference her note card before she could thank Big Head Todd and the Monsters - one of Colorado's most famous rock bands - for warming up the crowd and debuting a new song, Blue Skies, in her honor. But she delivered the rest of her 25-minute speech without notes, with feeling, and to constant, resounding applause.

"Now let me ask you, are you ready for change?" she began. And was the crowd ready for affordable health care and college? For renewable energy policy? For the war in Iraq to end?

One minute into her speech, the thousands of undergraduates standing on the grass in front of Clinton seemed more excited by her message than they were by the band.

Clinton made promises: She would withdraw the troops from Iraq, create millions of jobs in renewable energy by taking $50 billion in tax subsidies away from Big Oil, create universal pre-kindergarten, forgive more student loans and open up the congressional health care plan to all Americans.

Before Clinton's speech, Paul Lindsay, regional press secretary for the Republican National Committee, said that her proposals would result in higher taxes that would be "devastating for Colorado families."

Clinton also took aim at President Bush. She called Hurricane Katrina "a natural disaster turned into a national disgrace. If you had turned the sound off, you wouldn't have believed you were looking at pictures of America."

The crowd cheered before Clinton hushed it with a story that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once told her. On a trip to the Soviet Union in 1995, Albright discovered that residents had kept the U.S. flags handed out to them by GIs in World War II. Albright asked why they had kept the flags.

"Because we love America . . . and we always hoped someday we'd live in freedom, like America," Clinton said they told Albright. "I want to be the president who not only gets the rest of the world feeling that way about us again," Clinton said. "I want us to believe that about ourselves again."