It was a clearly belittled Bill Clinton who appealed to the Democratic convention.
I do not mean physically diminished, although the famous raspy voice sounds darker and, turning 74 on Wednesday, he looked a little more fragile.
It was the way he spoke from his bank in Chappaqua. It just did not sound like a Clinton speech. It sounded like a speech that could be written by anyone.
It was completely generic.
BILL CLINTON SKEWERS TRUMP IN CONVENTION ADDRESS: ‘THE BUCK STOPS THERE’
Those who liked the Clinton presidency and those who despised it always agreed that the man from Hope was a great communicator, even when he went on and on, as he did with so many states of State or the Union. But that man did not show up Tuesday night.
There was no emotion, no Arkansas down, no bite of the lower lip. Clinton had only five minutes, and was demoted after the less-than-considered first hour of the procedure. A retail politician to his core, he did not have much energy to thank his performance.
The former president described the election as a job interview and scored some points by criticizing President Trump’s treatment of the pandemic: “The Oval Office should be a command center, instead it should be a storm center. There’s just chaos. ”
Clinton mocked Trump as a man “spending hours a day watching TV and zapping people on social media”, saying in a real crisis, such an approach (to “make debt, bullshit and smaller”) ” falls like a house of cards. ”That was the only time he sounded short, well, Clintonesque.
He picked it up by saying that Joe Biden had helped bring the country back from the recession earlier, and went through a rapid list of policies, such as “paid family and medical leave,” which sounded 1992-ish. There was no narrative, nothing particularly personal.
For me, who both covered his campaigns – and even with his wife still to tackle the convention – this was the end of the Clinton era. In a virtual convention, he was just another ex-pole.
It’s easy to forget now, but Clinton ran as a Third Way candidate who opposes the “brain-dead politics” of both parties. He was a liberal president, sure, but one who worked with Newt Gingrich and signed the Defense of Marriage Act. A self-described New Democrat then, he is widely dismissed today as a grimly centered centrist who is far out of step with the increasingly left-wing party.
Clinton always had a love-hate relationship with what he called the “kneeling liberal press,” which largely turned against him at his impeachment and eventually proved that he was a liar.
If Clinton had disappeared in earlier coups after leaving office in 2001, he would now look like a further figure. But as the world knows, his wife ran for president in 2008 (when he went too far in beating Obama) and was the nominee four years ago, when the Clinton Foundation was a major issue. The pair never really got off the stage.
Do you think anyone is speculative in stories in 2016 about how a former president would adapt to the role of First Gentleman? He delivered a staring convention speech for Obama’s reelection, and yet has a way of stealing the spotlight.
But there’s an even more fundamental reason why the Biden team Bubba did not give a more prominent speaking conclusion. The #MeToo movement has even urged some liberal loyalists to address Clinton for his relationships with Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and others. Some women who set aside his sexual abuse in the 1990s now say he should have been fired. And the recent reports of him surrounding child predator Jeffrey Epstein – the Daily Mail has photos of Bill getting a neck massage from one of Epstein’s suspected victims – were a brutal reminder of his chaste past.
Clinton has been playing at Democratic conventions since 1988, when his endless speech came in the hall with such a kiss that he had to put on Johnny Carson and kill himself. Four years later he was the nominee. But that was more than a quarter of a century ago, and the world has gone on.
John Kerry, another nominee past, gave a much more lively speech praising Biden’s record for foreign policy.
And Jill Biden, a teacher who speaks from her former Wilmington high school, vividly described how she healed a broken family after the tragedy that claimed the lives of Joe’s first wife and daughter – and used that as a metaphor for it. cured of the land.
The online choreography was better on the second night, with sharper themes, although there were still embarrassing moments like 16 people in boxes speaking unison.
There was a Republican presence for the second straight night, with Colin Powell speaking for Biden and Cindy McCain (whose husband hated Trump) contributing a video about his friendship with Biden. I once saw Biden and John McCain slaughtering at a reception in Washington, and their report was very real.
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Meanwhile, there were those who said audiences would not be rivaled by this early hybrid programming. Ratings for the first night (led by MSNBC) dropped 28 percent more than four years ago, to about 18.6 million.
As for Monday night’s observations, some Democratic partisans like to keep up with the rapid cutting fire I found so unkind and awkward, and that’s fine. One virtue, they said, was that the speeches were shorter.
But many of them were too short, bare pieces, to the point where you wondered why the party was struggling to get speakers. I am not in pain for the days of the Lincoln-Douglas oratorio, but a good speech has a bow, building an argument designed to bring the audience along. Michelle Obama had plenty of time to report the personal and the political. Many others felt like a place in an overcrowded package just for their name. And I was grading on a curve.
The MSNBC panelists were, to be sure, happy. Rachel Maddow told viewers that ‘no one breathed 18 minutes’ during Michelle’s speech. “I mean my heart fell about four inches into my chest.” That’s the new thrill-up-the-leg, as outgoing MSNBC member Chris Matthews said of Michelle’s husband back in 2008.
Some leftists are obviously so desperate to defeat Trump that they can not bother to criticize the procedures, that they do not have the message.
‘What I saw on Monday night,’ writes columnist Frank Bruni, New York Times, ‘was not something to press or grade. It was something to ride and enjoy: a buffet for the hungry. It was salvation. I have zero interest in deciding if the mashed potatoes were appropriately fluffy when the asparagus was cooked. ”
Salvation trumps everyone, I think.
