Clinton redefines 'change' as wife makes run

    At the party's convention, she delivers a speech ennobling her husband while weaving in humor that brings him down to Earth. But during the Democratic National Convention’s second night, Hillary Clinton became the nominee, and the spousal duties were taken, for the first time, by a man.  
    For former President Bill Clinton, the assignment started from an uneasy place, for his marriage has been complicated (to say the least) by his serial infidelity. Although acknowledging that he and Hillary had been together through “heartbreak,” he stuck to storytelling.
    Like him or not, Bill Clinton is an accomplished storyteller in the ah-shucks Southern tradition. He uses humor. He offers description. He understands inflection and phrasing and makes the most of his soft Southern drawl. But with this speech, the former president took an unlikely rhetorical leap. He redefined his wife -- who has spent decades in politics -- as a change candidate, and he did it by changing the very definition of change.
    First, a word about the temple dance that we have come to expect from the candidate’s spouse -- hair stiffened to perfection and body packaged in a pastel linen suit. During her (or his) speech, the spouse paints a picture of a couple capable of withstanding the lean years, the bad-kid days and the demands of home and work.
    “They say that parents often have to get out of the house when their kids go off to college because it seems so lonely,” said Laura Bush, during her remarks at the 2000 Republican Convention. “Everyone deals with it in different ways, but I told George I thought running for president might be just a little extreme.”
    At times, the spouse is called upon to hit the reset button. During the 2012 Democratic Convention, Michelle Obama offered a personal picture of Barack Obama: 
    “To me,” she said, “he was still the guy who'd picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger side door...he was the guy whose proudest possession was a coffee table he'd found in a dumpster, and whose only pair of decent shoes was half a size too small.” 
    Bill Clinton started his address in much the same way, with a story about how he first met his wife in 1971 when the two were law school students at Yale University.  She was an intense blonde with no makeup and glasses. He was fascinated and began to stare at her in class. Then he saw her again in the library.
    “She was staring back at me,” he remembered. “So I watched her. She closed her book, put it down and started walking toward me. She walked the whole length of the library, came up to me and said, ‘Look, if you’re going to keep staring at me, and now I’m staring back, we at least ought to know each other’s names. I’m Hillary Rodham. Who are you?’ I was so impressed and surprised that, whether you believe it or not, momentarily, I was speechless.”
    He kept the stories coming, talking about how he proposed three times before Hillary said yes and how he took her advice after being defeated in an election. But in between, the former president tackled an issue that has become a liability for his wife: Hillary Clinton is a consummate insider, a continuity candidate in an election that has favored change and outsiders.
    Donald Trump, a real estate entrepreneur and reality show star with no political experience, easily defeated his Republican opponents, including U.S. senators and much-respected governors.   
    During the Democratic primaries, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, relatively unknown outside his home state, developed a loyal following and made a strong showing in caucuses throughout the country. Sanders, who spoke of political revolution and described himself as a Democratic Socialist, was absolutely about change.
    But when Bill Clinton spoke, he made the case that his wife was all about change too:  
    “If you believe in making change from the bottom up, if you believe the measure of change is how many people’s lives are better, you know it’s hard, and some people think it’s boring. Speeches like this are fun. Actually doing the work is hard. So people say, well, we need to change. She’s been around a long time. She sure has, and she’s sure been worth every single year she’s put into making people’s lives better.
    “I can tell you this. If you were sitting where I’m sitting and you heard what I have heard at every dinner conversation, every lunch conversation, on every long walk, you would say this woman has never been satisfied with the status quo in anything. She always wants to move the ball forward. That is just who she is.”
    At one point, he called her as the "best darn change-maker" he'd ever met. Even so, Hillary Clinton won the nomination despite the fact that she is the embodiment of the Democratic establishment: former first lady of Arkansas and the United States, former U.S. senator and former secretary of state. As a former member of the Obama administration, her political ideas are much like his.
    It would have been difficult to imagine anyone describing Hillary Clinton as a change candidate until Bill Clinton stepped to the podium to do just that. But his definition of change is not the change of revolutions or fiery political movements. It is a gradual change that comes with long nights of study and thought, the drip, drip, drip of progress.   

    Related:

    Clinton wins Democratic nomination 

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