Philadelphia
If her goal was to deliver a knock-out punch and reassert control of the presidential race, Hillary Clinton failed Thursday night. Clinton’s delivery was flat, her tone hectoring, and her theme meandering. If the trajectory of the presidential race changes at all after the Democratic National Convention, it will do so thanks to the supporting cast in Philadelphia, not the party’s headlining star.
Clinton’s speech was part biographical, part agenda-focused, and part a rebuke of her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. Each theme was disconnected from the others, which made the speech sound disjointed and unfocused. Her strongest case was that against Trump, which she touched on far too late in her address.
“Ask yourself: Does Donald Trump have the temperament to be commander in chief?” she said, late in the evening. “Donald Trump can’t even handle the rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign. He loses his cool at the slightest provocation. When he’s gotten a tough question from a reporter. When he’s challenged in a debate. When he sees a protestor at a rally. Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”
The prospect of a man as mercurial and temperamental as Donald Trump entrusted with the nuclear codes is the best argument Clinton and the Democrats have for themselves. Unfortunately for them, Clinton didn’t stick to this line. She emphasized her biography, recounting her childhood in Illinois all the way through her tenure as secretary of state. “The truth is, through all these years of public service, the ‘service’ part has always come easier to me than the ‘public’ part,” Clinton said in a masterstroke of self-serving self-deprecation. “I get it that some people just don’t know what to make of me.”
That’s the problem for her, though—she’s been in the public eye long enough that Americans know exactly what to make of her, and what they think of her. The attempts by both Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, who introduced her mother, to humanize her fell flat. It was wasted time and energy.
The same goes for Clinton’s expounding on her own agenda. She drew policy contrasts with Republicans—calling for a repeal of the Citizens United case, passing comprehensive immigration reform and stricter gun-control laws, and “expand[ing] Social Security”—in a year when the Republican nominee is wholly uninterested in policy specifics. She engaged in the type of virtue signaling that appeals to Democratic partisans—”I believe in science,” she said. “I believe that climate change is real and that we can save our planet…”—but has little to offer independent voters.
What made the effect of Clinton’s speech worse was how it compared with other prominent speakers in Philadelphia this week. From Wednesday night’s all-star cast to the Thursday-night speeches from retired Marine general John Allen and the father of deceased Army veteran Humayun Khan, Clinton was simply outmatched in spirit and in substance. The positive case for her own candidacy simply isn’t there, and she seemed unwilling or unable to make the full-throated case against her opponent. The speech was a reminder that for all of Trump’s faults as a candidate, without him as her foil, Clinton doesn’t have much of value to add.
