What Hillary’s Speech Needs to Do Tonight

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/magazine/what-hillarys-speech-needs-to-do.html

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Tonight even some of Hillary Clinton’s most ardent fans might be bracing themselves for disappointment in her speech at the Democratic National Convention. They might well console themselves with the possibility that her failure to do “realness” on an operatic scale is, by now, its own form of authenticity. But her less-forgiving viewers will be watching for signs of genuine life, for cues that can either reinforce or soften her abysmal poll numbers for honesty and trustworthiness, for likability.

Clinton is certainly relatable to every other human in this significant way: She is never less likable than when her desire to seem likable, the sheer effort involved, is most apparent. It is one reason that her 2008 announcement video, featuring her perched casually on a beige upholstered couch, a folksy, feminine would-be leader of the free world, was mocked; “Saturday Night Live” was still lampooning it during the most recent season, with her impersonator, Kate McKinnon, deliberately contrasting her forced, smiling accessibility with the killer instinct she appeared to be laboring to hide (a contractor walks by, there to repair seven newly punched holes in the wall). Clinton’s public smile has been dissected and analyzed endlessly, its sincerity usually deemed to fall short.

So she’s not great at smiling on cue — why does it matter? “As purveyors of falsity ourselves, no doubt we all recognize when a smile is really a mask, a substitute that forces another expression aside, usually one that would reveal an aggressive thought or desire,” writes the cultural critic Laura Kipnis, in her book “How to Become a Scandal” (she was writing about Linda Tripp).

There is no shame in a candidate for president’s having an aggressive thought or desire. For all we have been told about what we want or can expect from women in politics — empathy, compassion, nurturing — Clinton, by contrast, seems to fare exceptionally well in conflict situations that call for pushback. If Obama is a gifted orator who goes Spocky and wonky in debate, Clinton is the opposite — uninspired on delivery of soaring prose in front of an audience, but powerful with the quick, confident retort, a gift especially on display, for example, during the Benghazi hearings. When the committee’s chairman read out loud nasty comments that Sid Blumenthal had made about associates, Clinton defused the bomb with this: “You know, Mr. Chairman, if you don’t have any friends who say unkind things privately, I congratulate you. But from my perspective, I don’t see what this line of questioning does to help us get to the bottom of the deaths of four Americans.” She managed to be withering, while also deeply familiar — politicians, they’re just like us, with friends who sometimes bad-mouth other friends — and still end up on higher ground, a rhetorical hat trick. It was so efficient, it may well have been drafted in advance, but she certainly delivered it with convincing spontaneity; on-call, public emoting, the most artificial kind, may defy her acting skills, but she can surely pull off well-rehearsed, controlled defiance. She was deemed a cool commander of the facts in her debates with Bernie Sanders, and seemed to get a small thrill in naming, upon the request of Anderson Cooper, the enemies of which she was most proud. (“Well, in addition to the N.R.A., the health-insurance companies, the drug companies, the Iranians . . . probably the Republicans.”)

Clintonologists citing moments of public oratorical triumph for Clinton often evoke her groundbreaking feminist speech at Beijing in 1995 (in which she famously declared, “Women’s rights are human rights”), generally crediting its success to the closeness of the cause to her heart. Clinton has been fighting to give women more power since her days as an earnest firebrand at Wellesley, so that her authority and comfort level are surely at their peaks when she speaks on those issues. But what also made that speech so memorable, and enhanced her stature globally, was its assertiveness: She had fought to go in the first place, shaking off State Department concerns about U.S.-China relations, and once there, pulled no punches. (“This is all they offered the women of the world?” one journalist has recalled her saying to the crowd in a too-small auditorium, before the speech began.)

Unfortunately for Clinton, her task tonight does not lend itself well to those particular strengths, especially given that the convention has branded itself on love and unity. To deliver, she will need to call on something she has shown rarely in her political career and, what is surprising, displayed most effectively in utter defeat: joy. Her most famous speech in recent years was her endorsement speech for Obama in 2008, in which she lamented her failure to break the presidential glass ceiling but assured her supporters it now had “about 18 million cracks of light in it, and the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.” The joy was also in her delivery, a freedom that no doubt came, in part, from the relief of having reached the end of the road, but also in an unabashed embrace of the historic, triumphant nature of her candidacy.

It may be that it’s still more socially acceptable for a woman, for Clinton in particular, to lay claim to that kind of achievement at a time when she has simultaneously been humbled; every ecstatic, inspirational touch point in that speech was moderated by a profound sense of overall poignancy. On Tuesday, when Bill Clinton evoked his wife’s younger self — the girl that he met — he may not have been trying to invoke her sex appeal so much as the vulnerability of youth. There was something of that vulnerability, too, in Obama’s embrace of Clinton onstage after what he surely knew would be a wash of adoration following his own speech: He was in a moment of triumph, and his work was done, which only seemed to emphasize that Clinton, so short beside him, so grandmotherly, has some of her biggest tests ahead of her, starting with her speech this evening. Will she find her path a little bit easier this time — connect more readily, with more joy, to a fractured, weary electorate? By the time the lights go down on the convention tonight, we will know.