Delaware Liberal

Wednesday Open Thread [7.27.16]

Delaware Dem

Ezra Klein said Bill Clinton’s convention speech encapsulated how Hillary Clinton’s admirers see her, and why they think so much of the criticism she gets is unfair.

There was a moment in Bill Clinton’s winding, loving, and occasionally weird convention speech about his wife that encapsulated how Hillary Clinton’s admirers see her, and why they think so much of the criticism she gets is unfair.

“Speeches like this are fun,” said the former president, who clearly finds giving long, nationally televised speeches to be fun. “Actually doing the work is hard.”

That’s the view Hillary Clinton’s fans have of her. Hell, it’s the view Hillary Clinton has of herself. She knows she doesn’t give great speeches. “I am not a natural politician, in case you haven’t noticed, like my husband or President Obama,” she’s said. But then, she doesn’t think giving great speeches is the real work of politics, even though the media and sometimes the voters mistake it for the real work of politics.

That’s what her husband means when he dismisses speeches as “fun.” He gives great speeches. But he’s also been president. And he knows the difference.

Josh Marshall:

I’ve lived almost my whole adult political life in a virtual relationship with Bill Clinton, with many ups and downs, in the second half of the relationship more downs than ups. In many ways this was a classic and an entirely familiar Clinton speech – especially post-presidential Bill Clinton, more storyteller than advocate or campaigner. And yet it’s subtly altogether different because it’s intimate and personal, barely at all tied to policy, and rippling underneath the surface with devotion and guilt and restoration and ambition and a whole fabric of different things probably a lot of us who’ve been watching this story for a quarter century sense intuitively.

I’m used to watching all these speeches as an observer rather than an audience. But in this case, over the stretch of Bill’s speech, I became the audience. I got pulled in by his discussion of the cartoon Hillary versus the actual person – not a perfect person, who is? – a woman with immensely broad shoulders and an tremendously rich life history that leaves in the dust so many others of the soapbox characters that get kicked up and presented to us in political life. I’ve written a lot about the drama and the flaws. This was important for me to see and hear again.

Bill managed to pull the story together, with the riffs and ad-libs, getting revved up toward the end by the crowd and seeing some hint of the old younger guy.

Ed Kilgore:

To those of us who have been watching the 42nd president of the United States make speeches since the 1980s, his prime-time effort tonight on behalf of his wife’s effort to become the 45th president was a bit of a surprise. The man whose oratorical signature is the broad historical sweep, the identification of key generational challenges, the defense of officeholders (most obviously himself, but also Barack Obama in 2012) who wrestle with resistance to progress in the political system and in both political parties — that Bill Clinton did not speak tonight. He did not speak of new covenants or bridges from one to another century. And when he talked of accomplishments — his own and Hillary’s — it wasn’t with his usual barrage of statistics.

No, Clinton tonight only took us through recent history to explain in considerable detail — sometimes with humor, sometimes with context, sometimes with the air of a proud grandpa boasting of his progeny’s athletic and academic achievements — what Hillary Clinton has contributed to public life, much of it before most Americans outside Arkansas had ever heard of her.

David Dayen at The New Republic says the Democrats Aren’t in Disarray. They’re Practicing Democracy:

To be clear, a media chasing the familiar storyline of “Democrats in disarray” decided to overinflate the level of tension. The defining image for me on Monday was a Bernie Sanders supporter and Hillary Clinton supporter in heated discussion, while 30 reporters and cameramen huddled around them. I must have seen that 10 times. Conventions are a target-rich environment for activists seeking attention, and the endless repetition of news reports of particularly angry dissenters on social media expands the distortion like a balloon. Picking out the loudest and angriest person in a room full of thousands is not journalism, it’s a card trick. […]

Referring to Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama said, “When she didn’t win the nomination eight years ago, she didn’t get angry or disillusioned. Hillary knows that this is so much bigger than her own desires or disappointments.”

The Sanders delegates—so many of them new to politics—are working through that process, in piercing ways that can make the rest of us wince. But who knows? One of them might grow up to become speaker of the House, and will one day tell the press about being a 2016 delegate for Bernie Sanders, who was going to change the world. Disappointment can either breed resentment or determination. On Monday, we began to see the former transform into the latter.

New York Times: “In the days immediately after he took office, Mr. Obama ended the use of torture, lifted Mr. Bush’s ban on stem-cell research, relaxed enforcement of marijuana laws, blocked oil and gas leases on public lands, ordered the closing of the American prison at Guantánamo Bay within a year, scrapped oil-shale development in the West, reversed restrictions on union organizing, overturned bans on the use of affirmative action by colleges and approved stricter emissions rules.”

“Eight years later, as Mr. Obama and the veterans of his administration gear up to help Mrs. Clinton get elected in November, there is no better motivation for them than the prospect of a President Trump ordering a similar reversal.”

“Driven by those fears, the president plans to campaign aggressively for Mrs. Clinton this fall. Aides have largely cleared his calendar in October, and barring new crises, the White House expects Mr. Obama to be on the campaign trail almost daily leading up to Election Day.”

Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Obama knows well the risks when a new president of the opposite party comes into the White House because he spent much of his initial weeks in office reversing policies his predecessor, George W. Bush, had put into effect.”

Jeet Heer says Bill has learned to be a supportive spouse:

Bill Clinton is both Hillary Clinton’s greatest weapon and one of her biggest risks. As a popular former president, he’s in a unique position to vouch for his wife’s ability to serve as commander in chief. But bringing the Big Dog of American politics on stage inevitably runs the danger that he’ll steal the show. If the public sees Hillary under Bill’s shadow, then she’ll be diminished and her own presidential prospects dismissed as a continuation of his legendary career.

So it was to Bill Clinton’s credit that even as the featured speaker of the second day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, he was able to craft a speech where he kept the focus on his wife and used his political capital to persuade voters to overcome their doubts about her.

Brian Beutler says Bill has redrawn our portrait of Hillary:

“When I left the White House and Hillary went into the Senate in New York, I told her, I said, ‘For 26 years you have made a lot of sacrifices for my public life. So I’ll give you the next 26 years and if I’m still around we will fight about what we are going to do after that,’” Clinton said in an interview with CNN two years ago. “So we are just over a little halfway through the second 26 years and whatever she wants is fine with me.” […]

Clinton wasn’t there to atone for benefiting from her work ethic, or for at times being as much of an impediment as an asset to her political career. As NPR’s Steve Inskeep wrote, “he’s painting an extended portrait of a human being, who’s often talked about as if she isn’t.”

Clinton gave an audience of millions, most of whom don’t have time to read political biographies, a different framework for understanding his wife. His implicit point was that Hillary spent the first 26 years of their 52-year bargain gaining all of the skills required to be a political leader, and experiencing all of the partisan scrutiny of a political principal, but without the platform or hardscrabble upbringing required to shape her identity, the way he did as a boy from Hope, or John Edwards did as the son of a millworker.

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