Advertisement

Analysis: Why Bill Clinton's speech tonight will be unlike anything we've ever seen

 
Former President Bill Clinton attends the first day of the Democratic National Convention on Monday at the Wells Fargo Center, Philadelphia. [Olivier Douliery | Abaca Press via TNS]
Former President Bill Clinton attends the first day of the Democratic National Convention on Monday at the Wells Fargo Center, Philadelphia. [Olivier Douliery | Abaca Press via TNS]
Published July 26, 2016

There has never been a speech quite like the one Bill Clinton will deliver in Philadelphia, no matter what he says.

A husband speaking on behalf of his wife — that has been done before. A former president speaking in support of a prospective president is also nothing new. But the combination of the two is unprecedented. A former president who wants to be first man extolling the virtues of a former first lady who wants to be president. Only the Clintons.

Only the Clintons applies in so many ways. Only the Clintons have been hanging around together at the top of U.S. politics for a full quarter-century. Only the Clintons can excite and then exasperate their fellow Democrats with such dizzying predictability. Only the Clintons (or maybe now Obama) can send the Republicans into paroxysms of rage and the deepest, darkest pools of conspiracy theory. Only the Clintons can keep going and going no matter what obstacles others or they themselves throw in their way along their long and winding path.

Wilfredo Lee | Associated Press

Democratic presidential candidate Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas and his wife, Hillary, listen to speakers during his bus tour campaign stop August 7, 1992, in Strawberry Point, Iowa.

Wilfredo Lee | Associated Press

Democratic presidential candidate Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas and his wife, Hillary, listen to speakers during his bus tour campaign stop August 7, 1992, in Strawberry Point, Iowa.

Clinton and Clinton were 40-something postwar baby boomers when they arrived on the national scene, shaped by the vibrant and rebellious 1960s, rising to take power from a generation defined by the Great Depression and World War II. Bill was chowing down on Big Macs. Hillary had to deal with people focusing on her hairstyles and colored hair bands. Now they are old-timers, battered, if not beaten, by the vicissitudes of time and experience, agents of change transformed into what some consider symbols of the old school. Yet, despite it all, enjoying one more chance to make history.

When Bill takes the convention stage, he will look like a shadow of his former self, thinned by years of a vegan diet after heart-bypass surgery. His speeches for his wife during the 2016 primary campaign seemed subdued, with only occasional moments when he rose to his previous high standards. But aides and friends say that this speech means more to him than any he has given this year, that it will be all about the Hillary he knows beneath the public image, that he is mostly writing it himself and that he cannot wait to deliver it. "No one can do a better job talking about the things that Hillary has done, the fights she's taken on," said Robby Mook, her campaign manager. "Not the ones we know about, but the quiet ones."

The personal implications and political roots of this singular speech stretch back through the decades to the fall of 1970, when Bill and Hillary met in New Haven, Conn., at Yale Law School, where they were both students and realized they could get places together that they could not reach apart. Four years later, Hillary stunned her friends by leaving the East Coast and joining her boyfriend in the hills of northwest Arkansas, where he was running for Congress. For the next 30 years of their inimitable and tumultuous partnership, she subsumed her own political aspirations for the sake of their rise, serving when needed as his most important policy adviser and campaign strategist during their tenures in the Arkansas governor's mansion and later in the White House.

Greg Gibson | Associated Press

President-elect Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, attend an inaugural ball at the Sheraton Washington Hotel in Washington on Jan. 18, 1993.

Greg Gibson | Associated Press

President-elect Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, attend an inaugural ball at the Sheraton Washington Hotel in Washington on Jan. 18, 1993.

Over the course of those years, her strong feminism — the side of her that inspired Bill to enjoy a saying about the duo, "buy one, get one free," and that prompted her to explain that she did not intend to just stand by her man or stay home and bake cookies — was in conflict with the demands of their political survival. When necessary, standing by her man was precisely what she did. When he needed it for a comeback in Arkansas, she changed her last name from Rodham to Clinton. With his career and their futures on the line in Washington in the midst of the Whitewater investigation and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, she led the political defense, by framing it all as a fight against a vast right-wing conspiracy.

Protecting him — and their mutual interests — for so many decades led her to armor herself in what she considered a battle for the greater good. It was a variation of the ends-justify-the-means rationalization. Some of it was her own disposition, but it was also in large part because of him that she became encrusted with reflexive defensiveness, making her year by year more secretive and less than transparent in her dealings with the news media and the public.

As they were leaving the White House, his eight years up, nothing left for him to run for after a life of running, it became her turn. First the Senate. Then the unsuccessful presidential run in 2008. Then secretary of state. And now this moment, when Bill, who owes her so much, could pay off a long overdue marital and political promissory note by employing the full measure of his rhetorical skills to boost her history-making week as the first woman to become a major-party nominee for president.

Susan Walsh | Associated Press

First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton watches President Clinton pause as he thanks those Democratic members of the House of Representatives who voted against impeachment in this Dec. 19, 1998, file photo.

Susan Walsh | Associated Press

First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton watches President Clinton pause as he thanks those Democratic members of the House of Representatives who voted against impeachment in this Dec. 19, 1998, file photo.

There has always been a seesaw aspect to the Clinton partnership. When one is up, the other tends to be down, and vice versa. Political opponents who think they might weaken Hillary by revisiting Bill's libertine tendencies should know that her popularity ratings have consistently risen when she takes on the sympathetic role of victim. Although Bill considers himself a masterly political tactician, whatever magic he has too often disappears in his wife's campaigns.

At a key moment during the 2008 primaries, he managed to anger, if not alienate, African American voters in South Carolina and elsewhere by belittling Obama's experience, calling his run for the presidency a "fairy tale" and accusing the Obama campaign of "playing the race card" against him. Bill Clinton seemed flummoxed by Obama. For years he had luxuriated in Toni Morrison's description of him as "the first black president," at least in a symbolic or honorary way.

Now, along came someone who truly could be the first black president. His reaction did not go well.

This year, he recklessly strolled across an airport runway to gab with Attorney General Loretta Lynch days before the FBI decided not to prosecute his wife in the private-email-server case, playing into the hands of conservative critics.

He has been speaking at Democratic conventions since 1976, when the Carter team handed him a modest assignment to praise Harry Truman, and the results over the years have shown him at his best and worst.

He was humiliated while delivering the keynote speech for Michael Dukakis in Atlanta in 1988. Delegates yakked on the floor, barely listening. The lights in the hall were too bright. And he droned on so long that cheers erupted when he reached the words "in conclusion."

His own acceptance speeches had only a few memorable lines — from a place called Hope in 1992, the bridge to the 21st century in 1996. Four years ago in Charlotte, N.C., he articulated the case for the Democrats and against the Republicans with a power and simple clarity that Obama could not summon.

That speech, lifting the party out of a mild funk, might have been his most meaningful at a convention since 1992. Until this one.