On Fox News, after Bill Clinton’s speech, Brit Hume, while admitting grudgingly that it was “convincing” and “able to deal with facts,” dismissed what he had just heard as “wonky,” “self-indulgent,” and “thirty per cent too long.”
Too long? Really?
Clinton spoke for fifty minutes. What else takes fifty minutes? Let’s see. Three things come quickly to mind.
- A psychoanalytic hour.
- A college lecture.
- An episode of “The Sopranos.”
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Clinton’s speech—which, especially if President Obama is reëlected, will be remembered as one of the greatest tours de force in convention history—had elements of all three at their best. Like a session on Dr. Freud’s couch, it deployed insight to therapeutic effect. Like a lecture by a master of the form and the material (a Michael Sandel, say, or a Carl Sagan), it both educated and enchanted. Like HBO’s most addicting drama, it was ridiculously entertaining (and its lead character, a larger-than-life rogue, is someone it’s inadvisable to cross).
Clinton’s speech unfolded like a symphony in three movements—or, better, a jazz oratorio. He started with a summary that combined homespun values with to-the-point numbers:> You see, we believe that “we’re all in this together” is a far better philosophy than “you’re on your own.” [Cheers, applause.] It is. So who’s right? [Cheers.] Well, since 1961, for fifty-two years now, the Republicans have held the White House twenty-eight years, the Democrats, twenty-four. In those fifty-two years, our private economy has produced sixty-six million private sector jobs. So what’s the job score? Republicans: twenty-four million. Democrats: forty-two.
Q.E.D.
Clinton mounted a brilliant defense of Obama’s tropism for coöperation, citing the bipartisanship of his own post-Presidential work, mentioning that Obama’s cabinet appointees included people who had opposed his nomination (“He even appointed Hillary!”), and contrasting Obama’s openness (and past Republican practice) with the nihilism and hatefulness of “the far right that now controls their party.” And then this:
That was the overture. Next, the symphony. Shaping his arguments with those big hands as well as that hoarse voice, Clinton defended Obama’s economic record and eviscerated virtually every Republican critique of that record, one by one, issue by issue: jobs and unemployment; the auto bailout; energy policy; health care; the deficit and the debt. He explained in patient detail why Republican accusations that Obama has weakened Medicare and gutted welfare-to-work requirements are “just not true.”
Does that sound dull? Well, it wasn’t. The audience in the hall was enthralled, and so were “the folks at home.” My home, anyway.
Partly, I think, we were enthralled because he was enthralled. There was a script on the teleprompter, but wasn’t “reading” it; he was improvising on it in a, yes, disciplined way, the way a jazz soloist improvises on a familiar melody. His repeated admonitions—“Listen to this,” “Listen to this, everybody,” “Listen to me, now,” “Are you listening in Michigan and Ohio?,” “Now, finally, listen,” “Y’all you all got to listen carefully to this, this is really important”—came across not as hectoring but as breathless invitations, as if he was about to confide a particularly choice morsel of gossip. Each time he swivelled to a new issue—“Now, let’s talk about the debt”—you had the very opposite of a sinking sensation. You had a small thrill of delicious anticipation. O.K., let’s see how he puts this one away.
Fifty minutes? When Bill Clinton was President, he delivered nine State of the Union addresses. The first one clocked in at over an hour, and so did all eight of the rest. (Of the previous twenty-eight S.O.U.’s, just one—L.B.J.’s in 1967—had exceeded the sixty-minute mark.) The first couple of times Clinton did this, post-speech pundits opined that he’d gone on way too long, that he’d buried the audience’s patience under an avalanche of numbing detail. Polls and focus groups showed that the folks at home did not agree. They liked the length and they liked the detail.
A State of the Union speech is always to some degree a trial, because an S.O.U. is laundry-listy by nature and because the setting is a little too dignified, even when the audience isn’t. (A convention hall full of people wearing funny hats is more amenable to whooping and hollering than is the House chamber.) Clinton’s speech last night was more elegant, more thematically coherent, more focussed, and therefore more entertaining than an S.O.U. can possibly be. It had a simple story line. It had heroes (Obama and, implicitly, Clinton himself) and villains. It had drama and laughs.
I know I’m mixing my musical metaphors here, but Clinton’s speech put me in mind of something that takes a lot longer than fifty minutes. In its intensity, in the palpable love between performer and audience, in its passion, in its earnestness, in its straightforwardness—in its politics, even!—this was the rhetorical equivalent of a Bruce Springsteen concert. And while Clinton is more K Street than E Street, he was, last night, definitely The Boss.
Photograph courtesy Democratic National Convention.
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