It’s common knowledge that Bill Clinton tends to suck most of the oxygen out of a room. And so last night, when he ably (though at times long-windedly) moved to the side and explained to the world why his wife was equipped to be the next president of the United States, lots of Democrats breathed a sigh of relief. The New York Times had wondered only yesterday how Bill would conduct himself over the course of Hillary’s potential presidency. But it was immediately clear that Bill knew it was her night, and over a 45-minute period he shared insight into her family life, her professional achievements, and the core values that highlighted years of her hardscrabble work.

The speech outlined the careful work Hillary had done long before she set her eyes on any candidacy. Bill outlined the years she spent working for children in Massachusetts and Texas, the legal aid foundation she created to serve the poor in northwest Arkansas, and the segregation scandal she helped expose in Alabama. He reminded the viewers who would be tempted to be feel put off by another Clinton presidency that the narrative of Hillary Clinton isn’t one in which a man becomes president and then passes the reins to his wife waiting in the wings. It’s the story of a smart, hardworking, ambitious woman whose spouse happened to step into the limelight at the same time she was working for change behind the scenes.

Of course, the speech was also an attempt by the campaign to fight the low “likability” factor that has dogged Hillary since her days as First Lady. Who better than her husband, a man with whom the public knows she has shared a multitude of ups and downs, to create a more robust image of who she truly is? In a move designed to bring Hillary’s image full-circle, “humanize” her, and offer intimate glimpses into her home life, Bill explained that despite a long and lustrous career that had led President Obama to call her “the most qualified candidate” to ever seek the presidency, it was her maternal duty to Chelsea that mattered most.

“Through nursing school, kindergarten, tee-ball, soccer, volleyball, and her passion for ballet; through sleepovers, summer camps, family vacations, and Chelsea's own very ambitious excursions; from Halloween parties in the neighborhood to a Viennese waltz gala in the White House, Hillary first and foremost was a mother,” he said. “She became, as she often said, our family’s designated worrier—born with an extra responsibility gene.”


It’s a description that might give some of her feminist supporters pause. Do we need to be moms first, even if we’re Hillary Clintons? Should a woman necessarily be, as Hillary labelled herself, the family’s “designated worrier”? Does knowing that Hillary was an excellent mother say anything about her political qualifications?

These are questions we’ve been asking about women in general for decades, and they are once again being turned toward Clinton.

To paint her as a dedicated mother is an expected—and, in many ways, smart—move. Last week in Cleveland, the Trump children sought to conjure the same image of their father. Ivanka offered a story of her childhood in which she sat “playing on the floor by [her] father’s desk, constructing miniature buildings with Legos and Erector sets, while he did the same with concrete steel and glass.” Starting with Pat Nixon in 1972, family members are often selected to get up on the convention stage and introduce their loved one, or attest to his or her personal qualities. Campaigns want us to know the candidate as their families do, or at least make us think we might.

For a nominee like Clinton, whose unfavorability rating reached an abysmal 57 percent in the days before the start of the convention (and who has faced some pointedly sexist dislike over several decades), broadening the scope of who exactly she is—and perhaps softening that image—is a sound strategy to bring around hesitant voters. As angering as it may be, male candidates often see boosts in the polls after their wives or children speak about them publicly. Why shouldn’t Hillary try to use the same tactics?

But what kept Bill’s tribute to Hillary’s maternal strengths from casting a pink pall over his intentions is that it didn’t dwell on reminding us that Hillary is sweet or traditionally maternal, instead honing in one particular word: “responsibility.” There was no need to picture her cooing over her child. Instead, the address focused on a theme Bill kept coming back to and which he typified when he called Hillary "the best darn change-maker I ever met in my entire life”: Hillary worked to keep the loose threads all tied up, she made life happen on a day-to-day basis. And Bill wants us to imagine that she can continue that on a national—and global—scale. It's a message that compliments the hard work of mothers in general, and Hillary Clinton in particular.

In his plot of Hillary’s life, Bill painted her as a woman who didn’t step out of the workforce to raise a child, but who worked hard to do both at once. She didn’t calculate how best to ride her husband’s coattails; she sewed up her own and stepped out when the time was right.

And for a section of the electorate that views Hillary as woman with a thirst for power, Bill nailed home one important point for the campaign: She gets shit done.

Check out the full speech below: