What was missing in Bill’s speech about Hillary

voters. She started Arkansas Advocates for Families and Children. She took on the doctors lobby, using nurse practitioners to extend primary care to rural Arkansans. She was the architect of his political rehabilitation after he lost the governor’s mansion. She pushed through education reform as first lady of Arkansas. In the Senate she served on the Armed Services Committee and brought money to upstate New York. As secretary of state she persuaded a diverse group of countries to sanction Iran. And so on.

Bill Clinton’s painstaking, year-by-year history was whitewashed. He offered only oblique references to her handling of his sex scandals or the spectacular failure of her universal health-care bill early in his presidency.

But these omissions were not nearly as significant as what else was missing. Bill Clinton made a good case that his wife has worked hard to achieve reform in the past. But he did not offer much sense of why she did so and to what end. Hillary Clinton biographers have noted how her lifelong commitment to Methodism shaped her worldview and compelled her to pursue public service.

“Do all the good you can,” a catchphrase of hers, is a Methodist saying. Yet this side of her is usually only apparent to those who look closely. Meanwhile, Republicans fill the vacuum with suspicions about her ill-intent.

Moreover, unlike the speech Bill Clinton delivered for President Obama at the Democrats’ last national conclave, he did not provide a sense of where the country is and how her pragmatic vision suits the nation’s needs. “When times are tough and people are frustrated and angry and hurting and uncertain, the politics of constant conflict may be good. But what is good politics does not necessarily work in the real world. What works in the real world is cooperation,” he declared then.

Lines such as these made his 2012 speech a rousing call to conduct the nation’s politics more calmly. He mentioned instances of Hillary working with Republicans in his parade of details Tuesday night. But he said little about the moral choice voters face this election, between reason and unreason, making it seem oddly inadequate for an election year in which the country is apparently so upset that nearly half of Americans are telling pollsters that they will vote for Donald Trump.

“Why does cooperation work better than constant conflict?” he asked four years ago. “Because nobody’s right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day. And every one of us - every one of us and every one of them, we’re compelled to spend our fleeting lives between those two extremes, knowing we’re never going to be right all the time and hoping we’re right more than twice a day.”

Bill Clinton is not Melania Trump, put on stage merely to humanize a presidential nominee. He is a national leader in his own right, possessing a rare gift to communicate complex ideas simply and make high-minded principles seem common-sense. This election, meanwhile, is about a whole lot more than Hillary Clinton. It is about whether Americans will lose their patience with the political institutions and mores that have developed and served it over decades of struggle. Now more than ever, voters need to hear leaders explain to them clearly and forcefully why they shouldn’t. Stephen Stromberg is a Washington Post editorial writer.