A great acceptance speech: responsibility delivered with passion. Plus, an evisceration of the Trumplet.
I’m ready to work hard to raise money, build support, and elect this excellent candidate to the White House.
Thoughts?
Please share widely!
Reality-based commentary on politics.
I thought it was the best I’ve ever heard her.
is not someone you can trust with nuclear weapons.” HILLARY CLINTON
I can sleep soundly tonight knowing that this brilliant and strong woman is going to be our next Commander-in-Chief.
I salute you, Madam President !
Fred Rich LaRiccia
…my immediate thought was that won’t stop Elizabeth Warren from baiting him anyway. Sure enough at the moment, the C-SPAN camera turned to get a shot of EW in the audience.
Sorry, but eh. Longer than I’d expected, and didn’t feel a real flow to it. Back and forth between “Trump is bad”, “I’m a policy wonk”, “Let me inspire you”, and “This is history”. Felt like those four ideas were chopped and mixed without having the chance to get a rhythm.
Yes, as FRED points out, there were some good lines. But I was surprised it didn’t tell more of a story.
I agree. But, bearing in mind that she is famously not an electrifying speaker, I thought she did well. It’s tough when your performance is the culmination of a week that has included Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Rev. William Barber, Michelle Obama, and your husband, all of whom can orate with the best of ’em.
To use a baseball term, it was a “murderer’s row” of speakers. I’m not commenting on the delivery, just the speech itself. Most good speeches you can divide into chapters. Have no idea how you’d do it with this one.
I was only able to watch Hillary’s speech tonight, so I have to find some video of the speakers before her.
I got an e-mail from my republican uncle that he is voting for Hillary……the same man I have a healthy back and forth with at every family gathering. He is a 57 year old, white, middle class man…….a fiscal conservative, but with social views slowly creeping left. Success!
The best speaker wasn’t a politician but the Khan family and their humble resolve against bigotry. Hard to call Muslim Americans a fifth column when the sent, and lost their boy to war while Trumps kids haven’t served their country a day in their life in uniform or out. I think if anything won over swing voters it’s that speech which embodies that best of America and firmly calls out the worst.
And I think each speaker reinforced the notion that this was a unifying party running against a divisive figure who is unqualified for the job, Hillary is qualified for the job and has spent a career helping people. Even my parents who’ve never liked her personally are really fired up to elect her now, not just to defeat Trump. I think most Bernie supporters feel the same way. It’s a vote I’m proud of now, not just resigned to.
…before the uttered the magic words, “I accept your nomination.” That line is usually in the first paragraph and I was starting to think I had missed it.
Here’s the moment that did it for me:
This is not just an attack on Donald Trump. It is an attack on the very thing that makes Donald Trumps candidacy even remotely legitimate. This is a most definitive splintering of the office from the campaign: a clear break from the too-often conflated notions that the running for the office is all that is required for the doing of the job. Indeed, these sintered cliches have been the governing perspective in politics in America since, at least, Ronald Reagan, and its culmination, indeed its cleanest fulmination, is Donald Trump: under no other circumstances could his candidacy be taken at all seriously… but with this perspective we see that his candidacy was perhaps inevitable.
This is continuing the theme from Obama who noted on a previous night that you don’t know the job until you are in it… and I think I detected a note of regret in his voice for his own prior naivete… as well as a note of pride on Hillary’s behalf when he said, simply, “she’s been in the room.” And that for more than one president. And we’re beginning, I think, to learn that there might be a difference between good campaign and good job. That we have to deconstruct Donald Trump to do so is to our shame.
It’s worth noting that perhaps the most seamless joiner of these rather less apposite notions of electoral poetry and governing prose was Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill Clinton, the man who inaugurated the ‘permanent campaign,’ … and the extent to which Hillary Clinton is repudiating his methods remains undetermined. But what is clear is that Hillary Clinton is deliberately refusing to woo: that she is– to put it perhaps all too crudely — unwilling to seduce the electorate in the same way her husband did. This is all to the good. She is staking her candidacy on the idea — the ideal — of sobriety and reason. She has my vote on just these grounds.
…that running for office and holding office are two different skill sets. I’m still debating whether I should take comfort in the notion Trump has floated that he will let Pence take charge of both foreign and domestic policy, (What else is there?), making him in effect Prime Minister. Like many other GOP candidates this year way too conservative for my tastes, but objectively more qualified than Trump to be President.
.. that’s not a curse, since the two sets can be comprised of actual, and possibly complementary, skills. In fact, explicitly recognizing the difference is probably healthy for democracy. What we have seen is, in fact, the opposite: implicit denial that they are different or dissonant complicity in the attempt to escape the consequences of incompetence on the job by the smoke and mirrors of the campaigning. There’s no danger in having different skill sets under different contexts. There is danger in blurring the sets and mistaking skill at one being sufficient to carry water for the other.
Hillary Clinton is the first candidate in recent (and not so recent) memory to explicitly underline the difference and make effort to highlight her ability to do the job, rather than flagrantly sweet-talking the electorate, as her husband did.
That’s complicity in feckless disregard for the voters. Why would you take comfort in an absurd decision laying off responsibility and arrived at by way of sordid and lazy narcissism?
Regardless of how mercurial Trump has demonstrated himself to be, suggesting that yesterdays decisions are todays sarcasm, why would you welcome such an outcome as the guy nobody voted for getting to make the decisions? Where’s the comfort in an utterly passive-aggressive coup d’etat, no matter how comparatively competent the junta…?
Just trying to make sense of it, which I suppose may be futile. I think you and I closer to agreement then you make it sound.
Still the best I’ve heard by her. Nice coda against Trump’s “I alone can fix it” line.
Have to ding her for the millennial pander — “most generous young people ever” or some such. Typical boomer crap. Millennials (their children) are so wonderful.
It’s inspiring to see anyone improve or grow into better competence after hanging in there and taking abuse. But to see Hillary communicate so beautifully just in terms of stylistic appeal was inspiring. More proof that we can all continue to learn throughout our lives. That’s what I took from the speech.
Politically it was brilliant and effective. I think even my most ardent fellow Bernie supporters were softened, yet the speech reached effectively toward an American center. All good augurs for November.
…between having something for everyone without sounding like she was pandering to everyone.
Most importantly, I think she did what she needed to do: she looked and acted presidential; she delivered a strong and effective indictment of Donnie Little Hands; and provided an agenda that is a mix of policies that reaches out to the progressive wing of the party while starting to pivot to undecideds and moderate Republicans. The last point isn’t easy to pull off but I thought that she threaded the needle by staying left on the social and domestic issues, while being true to her hawkish self on the military and foreign policy issues. The speech was a bit too much of a laundry list at times, and could have been shorter, but was nevertheless effective.
I’d give it high marks. As is well known, I have trust issues with her, so I will wait and see. I purposely resisted listening to the speech because frankly, I find her oration style irritating. ba BA ba DA so SA TA TA! The meter of her delivery is predictable and to me, takes away from what she is saying. When she raises her voice, all I hear is my mother yelling at me.
She would do much better if she toned it down, spoke calmly even when speaking of monumental things, let her stage presence and history speak for itself; lure people into listening instead of shouting for their attention.
But again, I thought the speech itself was commendable and I hope she follows through with all of it (except the part where she wants health care to be a purchased right).
To me, this line in your comment explains a great deal: