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apsies:

…the message, on a day when Kennedy was remembered as being devoted the least of American society, was that Democrats need to fight. On that, the now silver-haired man from Hope was resoundingly clear.

“You need to back these congressmen and let them know you’re not going to let them be steamrollered by a bunch of people who have been frightened,” Clinton said, in reference to the town hall tumult of the last few weeks. “Don’t let anybody tell you that President Obama wants to ration health care. We are rationing health care in America.”

“I’m not a very good politician any more; I just say what I think,” Clinton said. “But I have been waiting for this for 40 years … to recreate the American dream.”

Gore, in a much shorter set of remarks, was loose-limbed and noticeably thinner than in recent years — and he seemed to elicit the night’s most emotional moment. Playing off the focus of the Kennedy funeral on the Gospel of Matthew’s parable of Jesus taking care of “the least of us,” Gore thundered that the country has “a moral duty to pass health care reform. This year.”

The two former sidekicks also showed a new warmth in a relationship that was famously frosty after Gore’s unsuccessful presidential bid — a period in which Gore blamed Clinton for not doing enough to elect him and Clinton blamed Gore for running a wretched campaign that didn’t utilize Clinton’s legendary political skills enough.

“Al Gore is the best vice president this country ever had,” Clinton said, adding that Gore has not gotten nearly enough credit for helping stage manage the recent release of the two journalists Clinton helped free from North Korea. Gore “managed an enormously complicated set of discussions that went on a lot longer than anyone knows. He did it with discretion, it never leaked to the press and it would have wrecked the whole thing if it had.”

via Politico