My housemate and I BARTed from the East Bay over to San Francisco Friday afternoon to attend a May 6th Hillary Clinton fundraiser at The Masonic (tickets priced at $45 for those under 35; $125 and $250 for general admission; and going on up for options with a VIP reception first and other perks like photos with the candidate). For those of you interested in hearing what Clinton is saying at her fundraising events these days, I decided to videotape it with my iPhone. You can hear everything, but the lighting fuzzed her face out (except in the final video, during her stage walk pre-exit, when the lighting finally allowed her face to show). I’m an amateur and it was hard enough just uploading the video to YouTube (which required cutting it into shorter segments) so it’s in multiple parts, but all of Hillary’s speech is there except the very first moments of her thanking the audience for the standing ovation.
After hearing a brief welcome from San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and speeches from Senator Dianne Feinstein and author Cheryl Strayed (“Wild”), and a song from gospel singer Aliya Hall, with actress Elizabeth Banks as MC, the crowd of several thousand gave Hillary a warm greeting along with an enthusiastic response throughout, which allowed us a chance to see her in a relatively relaxed state. While there were some protestors outside the event across the street as we entered and again as we left, I was surprised that no one interrupted the event inside (at similar events I’ve attended for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, there were always at least some protestors who made it inside and tried to interrupt, and with tickets widely available I expected the same this time; it’s the Bay Area after all!). I heard that Hillary limited her speech in L.A. to fifteen minutes due to interruptions there, but in San Francisco, she spoke for the full forty-plus minutes.
Both of us were excited to have had the opportunity to see the next president of the United States, and in good form. (I’d heard her speak once before, at an event she headlined for John Kerry’s campaign; interesting sidelight there was that “Don’t Think of an Elephant!” author George Lakoff was present and asked her a couple of questions, and then by chance ended up sitting across from me on BART on the trip back to the East Bay; during that conversation, he described Hillary as a “well-intentioned liberal” who was philosophically “an incrementalist,” certainly an accurate description.) After Californians have had a chance to vote for their preferred candidates on June 7 — and so many people have been working their hearts out for a long time now and deserve to vote their true preferences — I look forward to a united party working for victory in November, including not only holding onto the presidency but taking back the Senate, thus ensuring we have a Supreme Court that bends the arc of the moral universe back towards justice.
Bonus video of the talented young gospel singer Aliya Hall singing “A Moment in Time” before Clinton’s appearance.