Bill Clinton’s speech launched a full defense against Mitt Romney’s attacks of Barack Obama’s record.
Dispatches From the Democratic National Convention
How Clinton’s Speech Confronted Republican Attacks Head-On
Who's winning, who's losing, and why.
Sept. 6 2012 2:24 AM

Dispatches From the Democratic National Convention



Illustration by Robert Neubecker.

Illustration by Robert Neubecker.

Usually when a president visits his convention before his big night, it's to kiss his wife. Barack Obama arrived a day early to hug Bill Clinton. 

John Dickerson John Dickerson




The 42nd President of the U.S. Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama acknowledge the audience at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, NC, on Sept. 5, 2012 on the second day of the Democratic National Convention.

Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images.

By the time Barack Obama arrived on the stage to receive a bow from the 42nd president, it seemed like it should have been Obama doing the bowing. He owed at least that to the man he once criticized as a middling historical figure but whose aura his campaign considered so powerful it was enough just to have Obama in the same picture frame with him. 





As Clinton explained how Obama's student-loan policies would help people, he nodded to an argument I've heard a lot over the last few days. "Mitt Romney's convention was all about success that was determined by what you earned," said Tony Coelho, the former congressman and chairman of the Gore campaign.* "What about the success you can have as a teacher or a journalist or a fireman?" Clinton appealed to this sentiment when he said, "No one will have to turn down a job, as a teacher, a police officer, or a small town doctor because it doesn't pay enough to make the debt payments." This is a subtle but clever way to weave Obama's policies right into the fabric of the middle-class sense of aspiration. 



There is a big debate in political circles about whether presidents can really persuade. Clinton gave a classic persuasion speech, treating his audience like it was listening, laying out the case with an argument behind it. Will it work? Do people listen to long-reasoned arguments anymore? Clinton certainly thinks so: "Folks, whether the American people believe what I just said or not may be the whole election. I just want you to know that I believe it. With all my heart, I believe it."

In elections it’s easier to persuade than when you’re president. The choice is binary, but in the modern world of communication, what will live on in future news cycles?

In 2008, the tension between Barack Obama and President Clinton wasn't just that Obama beat Clinton's wife in the primaries. Obama downplayed President Clinton's achievements as president. He famously said Ronald Reagan was a more transformational president and blamed "Clintonism" for selling out Democratic principles in an orgy of what Obama called "triangulation and poll-driven politics." Now he is hoping that voters will see himself in line with that Clinton record. What he once cast away is now his life raft.

Tomorrow night President Obama will take the same stage and deliver his speech behind the same podium. He might be up a little late tonight tweaking his remarks. Clinton is a tough act to follow. It wasn't supposed to be that way. Obama was going to speak in the vast Bank of America stadium outdoors, but the bad weather changed things. The sweeping plans to follow Bill Clinton were not to be. Obama will have to settle with a less grand result than he’d once envisioned. It’s an outcome not unlike the Obama presidency itself.


Read the rest of Slate’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention.

Correction, Sept. 6, 2012: This article originally misspelled Tony Coelho's last name. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

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