The Alliance for American Manufacturing’s “Manufacture This” blog is pointing out that Pittsburgh television station KDKA has posted full, uncut video of both candidates speeches at Monday’s candidates forum.
Watch the videos:
As you probably know, on Monday I had the opportunity to attend a forum put together by the Alliance for American Manufacturing that featured both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. During the event I managed to record audio of the candidates speeches. This is nothing fancy, just a small digital voice recorder sat on a table at the back of the room. It is understandable for the most part, and actually turned out much better than I expected it would.
I don’t have the Hillary speech sliced and diced yet, but it should be up this weekend.
Yesterday I took place in what will surely be one of the most memorable events of my life. I saw both Democratic presidential candidates speak on the same day about a topic I find extremely important, trade and manufacturing. This all took place at the Alliance for American Manufacturing’s candidates forum in Pittsburgh, PA.
Both candidates spoke for about 45 minutes to an hour, including a short question & answer session. Obama spoke in the morning, with Clinton’s speech ending the days events around noon. A panel on trade filled the time between the two speeches. It was mentioned that John McCain was invited to attend, but declined. This was met with a round of laughter. McCain did manage to find time in his schedule to visit Pittsburgh today however, where he discussed other parts of the economy in front of a friendly audience.
Obama seemed to be the crowd favorite, receiving multiple standing ovations. He did take a few shots at Clinton and respond to claims of “elitism”, but he mostly stuck to the topic at hand.
Clinton’s speech started out on a bad note. She made an allegation that Obama had spent most of his speech attacking her was met with grumbles from the crowd and even some people shouting “no”. Clinton soon recovered though, when she moved on to policy issues. During the Q&A session she deflected a somewhat loaded question over her husbands support of NAFTA by saying that “As smart as my husband is, he does make mistakes”, cutting through tension and providing an opening for a more serious answer about renegotiating NAFTA.
I think both Obama and Clinton demonstrated that they both understand the plight of the American worker. Policy-wise, the aren’t all that different. They both promised to do a better job at enforcing our trade agreements in their current form and to work to renegotiate them to give American workers a level playing field.
It was said at one point that this event was organized in only 11 days, though you wouldn’t have been able to tell it by looking around. Things ran quickly and efficiently. I, the worlds biggest complainer, was greatly impressed.
I’m sure they’re be several other posts related to the forum posted over the next couple days as I review my recordings of the forum. You’ll be able to find all past and future posts on this topic here.
I highly doubt this works, but it’s worth a try. I can’t see the viewer right so let me know if the updates aren’t showing up.
Well I made it, I’m in. I think I’m sitting in the traveling press pool area but it’s the only place with tables and outlets.
If your reading this post, I’ve successfully managed to wake up at 4 A.M. and head out for the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh. If things have worked out as planned, I’ll be picking up press credentials and attending a closed door forum on economic issues put on by several labor unions. Now here’s the exciting part: both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will be speaking there. John McCain was also invited, but declined to attend.
I’m not exactly sure how exactly I’ll cover the event, as my laptop is still down with a crashed hard drive (I’ve been too disgusted to fix it). I’ve got a creative solution that may allow me to restore limited functionality to it. Regardless of how that works out I’ll be trying to post updates to the OVP Twitter page (this is not my personal account, I don’t want to bombard people with unwanted messages. Follow OVP for these messages) and some iPhone photo’s to the OVP Flickr page. I’ve also added Twitter and Flickr badges to the sidebar to display some of the most recent updates.
Update: I’ve arrived at the convention center 90 minutes early.
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