This led to some debate between the former President and his premier, with Adams insisting that Jackson’s desire to extinguish the debt should be “indulged and not opposed,” and that the President’s idea “would take greatly with the people.” This view piqued and mortified Clay, who had found all the party leaders in the conference becomingly obsequious with the exception of Adams. That Adams was equally disgusted we may gather from his description of Clay’s manner as “super-presidential,” and from the following entry in his journal: “Clay’s motives are obvious. He sees, that next November, at the choice of presidential electors, the great and irresistible electioneering cry will be the extinguishment of the public debt. By instant repeal of the duties he wants to withdraw seven or eight millions from the Treasury and make it impossible to extinguish it by the 3rd of March, 1833. It is an electioneering movement, and this was the secret of these movements, as well as of the desperate efforts to take the whole business of the reduction of the tariff into his own hands.”[398] The Democratic opinion that Clay was partly actuated by a petty partisan desire to deprive the Administration of the credit for wiping out the national debt, corroborated as it is by Adams, is plausible enough. At the same time, it was manifestly Clay’s purpose to rally the protected industries to his standard in the presidential campaign. Meanwhile the lobbyists of the protected interests, flocking to the capital, crowded the rotunda every morning, mixing with the statesmen. Here, at the time, was the Republic in miniature--lobbyists, statesmen, correspondents, and plebeians mingling in a common arena, with the visiting tourists ranged about to view the celebrities in their moments of conversational unbending.[399] Clay made the presentation of his plan the opportunity for his first political speech of his campaign. The Senate was crowded to hear him. It was not enough that he should acknowledge the approach of the extinguishment of the public debt, and base his argument for the reduction of duties upon that fact. The possibility of the passing of the debt during the Administration of Jackson was clearly annoying, and he attempted, laboriously, and at considerable length, to deprive it of any credit. The plan of the Administration to reduce no duties on unprotected articles previous to March, 1833, and to make a gradual and prospective reduction on protected articles, he denounced as a scheme to “destroy the protecting system by a slow but certain poison.” There was nothing remarkable in his first speech except its affectation of modesty, and his reference to old age and declining power.