Chris Wallace reacts to Bill Clinton's keynote speech: Still the 'secretary of explaining' things
'He seemed diminished, until he gave his speech,' says Chris Wallace discussing the effectiveness of Bill Clinton's keynote speech
It was a clearly diminished Bill Clinton who addressed the Democratic convention.
I don’t mean diminished in a physical sense, although the famously raspy voice sounded thinner and, turning 74 on Wednesday, he looked a bit more frail.
It was the way he spoke from his couch in Chappaqua. It just didn’t sound like a Clinton speech. It sounded like a speech that could have been written by anyone.
It was utterly generic.
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Those who liked the Clinton presidency and those who despised it have always agreed that the man from Hope was a great communicator, even when he went on and on, as he did with so many State of the Union addresses. But that man didn’t show up Tuesday night.
There was no emotion, no down-home Arkansas saying, no biting of the lower lip. Clinton only had five minutes, and was relegated to the lesser-watched first hour of the proceedings. A retail politician to his core, he had no crowd energy to fuel his performance.
The ex-president described the election as a job interview and scored some points by criticized President Trump’s handling of the pandemic: “The Oval Office should be a command center, instead it’s a storm center. There’s only chaos.”
Clinton did ridicule Trump as a man “spending hours a day watching TV and zapping people on social media,” saying that in a real crisis, such an approach (to “blame, bully and belittle”) “collapses like a house of cards.” That was the only time he briefly sounded, well, Clintonesque.
He wrapped up by saying Joe Biden had helped bring the country back from recession before, and went through a quick list of policies, like “paid family and medical leave,” which sounded 1992-ish. There was no narrative, nothing especially personal.
To me, who covered both his campaigns--and even with his wife yet to address the convention--this was the end of the Clinton era. In a virtual convention, he was just another ex-pol.
It’s easy to forget now, but Clinton ran as a Third Way candidate who denounced the “brain-dead politics” of both parties. He was a liberal president, to be 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 mushy-minded centrist who is way out of step with the increasingly left-wing party.
Clinton always had a love-hate relationship with what he called the “knee-jerk liberal press,” which largely turned against him during his impeachment and eventually proved that he was a liar.
Had Clinton faded into elder statesmanship after leaving office in early 2001, he would seem a more distant figure now. But as the world knows his wife ran for president in 2008 (when he went too far in slamming Obama) and was the nominee four years ago, when the Clinton Foundation was a major issue. The couple has never really gotten off the stage.
Remember all the speculative in stories in 2016 about how a former president would adjust to the role of First Gentleman? He did deliver a stirring convention speech for Obama’s reelection, yet has a way of stealing the spotlight.
But there’s an even more fundamental reason why the Biden team did not give Bubba a more prominent speaking slot. The #MeToo movement has prompted even some liberal loyalists to denounce Clinton for his relationships with Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and others. Some women who brushed aside his sexual misconduct in the 1990s now say he should have resigned. And the recent reports of him hanging around with child predator Jeffrey Epstein--the Daily Mail has pictures of Bill getting a neck massage from one of Epstein’s alleged victims--have been a brutal reminder of his checkered past.
Clinton has been starring at Democratic conventions since 1988, when his endless speech landed with such a thud in the hall that he had to go on Johnny Carson and make fun of himself. Four years later he was the nominee. But that was more than a quarter-century ago, and the world has moved on.
John Kerry, another past nominee, gave a much more vibrant speech praising Biden’s foreign policy record.
And Jill Biden, a teacher speaking from her former Wilmington high school, movingly described how they healed a broken family after the tragedy that claimed the lives of Joe’s first wife and daughter--using that as a metaphor for healing the country.
The online choreography was better on the second night, with sharper themes, though there were still embarrassing moments like 16 people in boxes speaking in 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 backslapping at a Washington reception, and their rapport was very real.
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Meanwhile, those who said audiences wouldn’t be riveted by this strange hybrid programming were right. Ratings for the first night (led by MSNBC) dropped 28 percent over four years ago, to about 18.6 million.
As for the reviews of Monday night, some Democratic partisans liked the rapid-fire jump-cutting that I found so disjointed and awkward, and that’s fine. One virtue, they said, was that the speeches were shorter.
But many of them were too short, mere snippets, to the point where you wondered why the party bothered to get those speakers. I don’t pine for the days of Lincoln-Douglas oratory, but a good speech has an arc, building an argument designed to bring the audience along. Michelle Obama had enough time to meld the personal and the political. Many others felt like were being jammed into an overcrowded package just for their name value. And I was grading on a curve.
The MSNBC panelists, to be sure, were overjoyed. Rachel Maddow told viewers that “nobody breathed for 18 minutes” during Michelle’s speech. “I mean my heart dropped about four inches in my chest.” That’s the new thrill-up-the-leg, as now-departed MSNBCer Chris Matthews said of Michelle’s husband back in 2008.
Some left-wingers, of course, are so desperate to beat Trump that they can’t be bothered to critique the proceedings lest they mar the message.
“What I saw on Monday night,” writes New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, “wasn’t something to be parsed or graded. It was something to rush toward and relish: a buffet for the starving. It was salvation. I have zero interest in decreeing whether the mashed potatoes were suitably fluffy or the asparagus overcooked.”
Salvation trumps all, I suppose.
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