You may not remember this, but four years ago Bill Clinton spoke on the third night of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. And it turned out to be the hinge of the campaign against Mitt Romney.
Clinton spoke for almost 50 minutes. I was watching the teleprompter that night, and nearly half of the speech was ad libbed. It was a cross between a political speech, a TED talk, and the best freshman econ lecture you’ve ever heard. Go back and watch it, if you can spare the time. Clinton’s roguish charm has always been lost on me—I’ve never understood how people are fooled by his transparent phoniness. But this remains one of the two or three most bravura political performances I’ve ever seen.
Clinton wasn’t just dazzling that night—he was the first person in the course of the entire campaign to construct and explain a coherent rationale for why, despite everything, America should re-hire Barack Obama for another four-year term.
Don’t take my pinko-commie word for it. Here’s Fred Barnes’ assessment the morning after Clinton’s speech:
Two days later, President Obama half-joked that he should hire Clinton as his “secretary of explaining stuff.” But what really snapped people’s heads back was what happened in the polls. The day before Clinton spoke, Romney and Obama were tied—46.8 to 46.8—in the Real Clear Politics average. The next day Obama’s poll numbers started moving. Five days later, Obama was at +4 in the Real Clear average. Nobody remembers a word Barack Obama said at his own convention—Bill Clinton was responsible for his entire bounce.
He was that good.
Bill Clinton was plenty good on Tuesday night. But he wasn’t that good. He opened with a charming, shaggy dog story about how they met cute, and their courtship. If it’s possible to humanize Hillary Clinton, her husband probably did it. At least for a spell.
He focused relentlessly on Hillary’s biography. So much so that his only direct reference to Trump stood out like a beacon. In what seemed like an ad-libbed aside, he pointed to Anastasia Somoza in the audience—the woman with cerebral palsy who spoke on Monday who movingly said that she felt sorry for Donald Trump—and remarked that Hillary “doesn’t make fun of people with disabilities. She tries to empower them based on their abilities.”
From there, Clinton tried to paint his wife as “a change-maker.” “Look—this is a really important point,” he said. “If you believe in making change from the bottom up…actually doing the work is hard.” But Hillary is “a change-maker” who “makes people’s lives better.”
Clinton built on this point by talking about his wife’s social-justice crusading through law school and in Arkansas. The most impressive story he told was about how Hillary had worked with Tom DeLay on a bill to make it easier for people to adopt children out of foster care.
And when he finally made his turn, Bill tried to defuse the charges which had been leveled against Hillary last week at the Republican convention. He said that they simply weren’t true, that they were fiction, that the opposition was turning Hillary into “a cartoon.” This might have been more persuasive had he tried to explain a single one of the charges against his wife—on Benghazi, on her flip-flopping on trade, on the mishandling of her private email server. If he could have contextualized even one of these problems in a way that would have sounded reasonable to independent voters, it would have been a big deal.
He did not. Probably because he could not.
So while all of the Clinton rhythms were there—instead of saying “I was reelected as governor,” he says, “I became the first governor in the history of our state to be elected, defeated, and reelected again,” which is beautiful speechcraft—the siren song didn’t quite work.
Why is that?
One possibility is that he sandbagged his wife. The Clinton marriage/corporate partnership is one of the great unexamined stories of the last 15 years. Our culture is so obsessed with celebrity that we know every last detail of Kim Kardashian’s life—yet no one, anywhere, ever asks the Clintons how, exactly, this arrangement works. Knowing the depths of Bill Clinton’s narcissism, it’s not crazy to think that he might secretly, in his heart of hearts, want to be the only POTUS in the family. If it was that easy, anyone could be president.
But I don’t really buy that. Clinton is such a needy figure that it seems impossible that he could stand in front of 25,000 adoring fans and not try to show them the goods. No matter what resentments he might harbor toward his wife, Bill Clinton needs to be loved. He needs to prove to people he’s still the Big Dog. That, like Doc Holiday, he’s in his prime.
Possibility number two, then, is that he’s not in his prime. That Secretariat saddled up, but just couldn’t pull out one more race. He’ll be 70 in three weeks, after all. Name the last American orator who still had his fastball that late in his career?
But I don’t really buy that, either. Clinton was fluid and charming. He knew what he was doing up onstage and his delivery mechanics were as solid as ever. The problem wasn’t Bill Clinton. It was his material.
Which leads to the third possibility: That Hillary Clinton is such a complicated figure and such a deeply-flawed candidate, that even Bill Clinton could only do so much for her.
