President Bill Clinton knew when he came onstage Wednesday night in Charlotte that he was loved—this was a crowd willing to clap along to Fleetwood Mac—and he decided to stay, maybe just to hear the shouts and applause, as long as he could. Ryan Lizza and John Cassidy have more on what he said—the memories, the budget math, the tributes to Michelle and Hillary, the endorsement of Obama. He explained, step by step, how multiple budget measures worked, and seemed to treat his prepared text as rough notes to remind him of what was in his head. “Don’t you ever forget it,” he said, in similar words several times, and it seemed that he had forgotten nothing—not the look of economic statistics in late 1994, not who had asked whom for what when it came to welfare waivers.
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So what he did forget was all the more striking. The word “brass” was used in the speech, when he was talking about Paul Ryan’s rhetorical shamelessness. The word “Afghanistan” never came up. Did it cross Clinton’s mind? Iraq made it in, but just barely, in his praise of Joe Biden for managing the withdrawal of our troops from that country; no one was praised for managing anything on the ground in Iraq. He didn’t get much more specific than saying that Obama’s foreign policy was characterized by “inclusion,” and that Obama and Hillary were building “a world with more partners and fewer enemies.” Our foreign wars were reduced to little more than the follow-up to a laugh line about how clever Obama was to hire Hillary after the election.
For soldiers, there was a little more than that—a cloud of Clintonian hug words. “I am very grateful to men and women who served our country in uniform through these perilous times,” he said. What perilous places they had been in, one wouldn’t know. In a sentence or so more, they stopped being active-duty soldiers and became veterans. Clinton talked about what Obama had done for them once they came home, and what it said about his sense of honor and his temperament. Afghanistan and Iraq, in this formulation, were tests not of strategy but of character.
And yet, even after troop reductions, we will still have almost seventy thousand troops there at the end of this month. The last few weeks have seen a series of troubling stories—about Afghan troops killing American ones, about the suspension of a militia-training program, about our tragic facilitation of corruption. Perhaps there was no ending for Clinton to point to, but that didn’t stop him on other subjects. Throughout the convention, the Democrats have, without a doubt, done a better job of remembering that there are soldiers on active duty than the Republicans did in Tampa—but the bar was pretty low.
And Iraq and Afghanistan were just the countries where we have soldiers—the ones that might have been expected to be most vivid on the map. He mentioned America falling on a list of the countries with the most college graduates, but the rising nations were not named, serving, instead, as placeholders—the forces of competition, not even individualized by putting them in native dress. There has not been much foreign policy at this convention, other than a scuffle about what to call Jerusalem in the platform. But in such a sprawling nomination speech, the omission was particularly notable. Never mind the finer-grade foreign-policy issues that could, in their way, define this Presidency: the use of drones and war powers, what to do about Iran or Syria, or about the euro. Why not even a reminder of the red phone and the nuclear codes? Bill Clinton used to have those at hand; doesn’t he remember how that felt? Does the question of who else might have them ever make him, a little bit, scared?
Photograph by Scott Eells/Bloomberg/Getty Images.
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