CHICAGO — Imagine seeing Lyndon B. Johnson, if he had still been alive more than three decades after winning his first Democratic presidential nomination, striding to the lectern at the United Center in 1996 to speak at the convention that renominated Bill Clinton. That is the equivalent measure of time, 32 years, between Clinton’s first nomination and the speech he delivered in that same Chicago arena Wednesday night on behalf of Kamala Harris.
Analysis by David Maraniss
Clinton was only 46 when he entered the White House, the third-youngest president in U.S. history, behind only Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, his boyhood hero. Now, having just turned 78 on the first day of this convention, he is the lion in winter, or at least an old cat lolling in the late summer sun.
It is tempting to say that this might be Clinton’s last hurrah, but that was said many times during his political career, and he defied the assumption every time. Loss and recovery is the theme of his life. When he was a teenager, he feared that he would die an early death like the other men in his family, but he has somehow survived beyond his own expectations. It has now been 20 years since he was first diagnosed with heart problems and underwent quadruple-bypass surgery. He has long since abandoned McDonald’s cheeseburgers in favor of a mostly vegan diet, and has lost considerable weight, but his health has wavered over the years. (His old habits prompted him to joke Wednesday night that Harris, who worked at the fast-food joint during college, “will break my record as the president who spent the most time at McDonald’s.”) He appears frail and slightly shaky, his voice a relative whisper of the good-ole-boy twang he had as the Elvis of Arkansas. The signature lip bite is still there, as is the finger-punching style he picked up from Kennedy.
But Clinton was far from his most eloquent on Wednesday night. He spoke slowly and without much energy, apparently not reading from the teleprompter but fumbling over pages of script on the lectern, often looking down to find his place, his voice sometimes cracking and the flow of his sentences often broken, like an actor who had not memorized his lines. His rhetoric did not soar, lacking cadence and poetry, with none of the trademark extemporaneous stanzas that marked the best speeches of a man who over four decades has delivered thousands of them.
But if the man is diminished, it is not only physically. The world has changed around him. At the New York convention where he first won the nomination in 1992, the theme song was Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (thinking about tomorrow).” This week at the United Center, yesterday’s gone and tomorrow is here, and it’s all about a youth culture of social media influencers and rappers and a joyously free-flowing aura that smothers the cultural vibes of Clinton’s once-hip baby boom generation. Clinton’s trademark phrase was opportunity and responsibility. Harris’s is freedom.
