Bill Clinton presents his wife as an object of desire
He spoke of desiring her: her thick blonde hair, her flowery white skirt, her magnetic personality.
He was almost titillating as he recalled chasing after her and getting close enough to “touch her back.”
He used intimate details to reveal her feelings about his three marriage proposals.
Never before has a spouse talked about a presidential nominee at a political convention quite like Bill Clinton described Hillary Clinton here on Tuesday night. Then again, a man has never talked about a woman in this context before.
It had always been political wives who shared personal anecdotes to warm up their husbands, especially in the eyes of female voters. Those details were rarely very emotional, though, for fear of feminizing the nominees. Future presidents did not want Americans to hear about them crying.
From the dais of the Democratic convention, Bill Clinton talked about Hillary Clinton crying, and so much more. In doing so, Bill Clinton began redefining the American presidency as a female institution.
A Clinton win in November would obviously give the country a female president. But for 227 years, the presidency has been associated with stereotypically male qualities — strength, resolve, fearlessness — and the embodiment of power in a deeply patriarchal political system.
American attitudes about the presidency would not change overnight with her election, and certainly would not with one speech by a spouse. But Bill Clinton was clearly trying to nudge voters to see a woman’s strengths and experiences as a natural fit for the presidency.
Not everyone appreciated the former president’s lingering over his early attraction to the 23-year-old Hillary Rodham. Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC host, called it “shocking and rude,” and suggested it diminished Hillary Clinton’s many accomplishments.
“It was a controversial way to start, honestly, talking about the girl, a girl, leading with this long story about him being attracted to an unnamed girl and thinking about whether he was starting something he couldn’t finish — building her whole political story, for the whole first half of the speech around her marriage to him,” Maddow said.
But the former president clearly wanted to tell Hillary Clinton’s story through the lens of their courtship and 40-year marriage.
This was an audacious strategy, given that their marriage is one of the most complicated and contentious in modern politics. One of his fiercest declarations — “she will never quit when the going gets tough, she will never quit on you” — could not help but conjure up his history of infidelities. In doing so, he humanized a marriage that has baffled many Americans while also reminding people of his philandering and her compromises.
The approach was “a risky one given the fact that the speaker has famously not maintained Mrs. Clinton as the sole object of his sexual desire in the ensuing 45 years since she first caught his eye,” said Katherine Jellison, a professor of history at Ohio University who focuses on women and gender.
Bill Clinton’s bet was that by talking so personally about Hillary Clinton, voters would envision qualities that they want in a president. He also hoped people would see through what Bill Clinton called the “cartoon” image of her as a dishonest and untrustworthy figure. A majority of American voters see her that way, according to polls, an image that Bill Clinton links to Republicans and other political enemies, as well as the news media.
He used his speech to offer a loving and layered portrait instead, recalling how Hillary Clinton struggled to leave their daughter at college on move-in day, and how they cried together on Tuesday morning over the death of an old friend.
Whether his speech causes people to see Hillary Clinton differently — or makes people uncomfortable with the Clinton marriage all over again — will become clearer in time, not only through polls but also in the chatter among voters.
And while Maddow and others offered a critique of Bill Clinton’s portrait, clearly uncomfortable with the framing of the first female major party nominee as an attractive girl, the speech seemed less directed at them and more at the voters who cannot warm to Hillary Clinton.
After all, polls already show that Americans believe Hillary Clinton is up to the job; they just are not sure they like her enough to elect her to do it.
Political wives often make their husbands sound like saints. Bill Clinton made Hillary Clinton sound likable, which is no small thing in politics.
“I married my best friend,” he said. “I have lived a long, full, blessed life. It really took off when I met and fell in love with that girl in the spring of 1971.”