Clinton speech fell short of hopeful, bordered on sad

Whatever happened to more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living?

When Hillary Clinton returned to Wellesley College to deliver her third commencement address, listeners hailed her not-so-veiled jabs at President Donald Trump as a dispatch from the resistance, her jokes about the healing powers of chardonnay as Hillary unleashed. Though Clinton mixed her somber warnings with hopeful exhortations, the speech left me feeling glum and out of step. I understand why it's revitalizing to see that the 2016 election didn't break the woman at the center of it. But her Wellesley speeches feel like a chronicle of Clinton's diminishing expectations and increasingly somber acknowledgments of what a woman has to endure if she's going to persist.

Plenty of college students have dreamed that the world might be transformed, and not merely those who graduated into the turbulence of the 1960s and early ' 70s. When Hillary Rodham took the stage in 1969, she sounded so buoyant that you could be forgiven for wondering if, unlike her husband, she had actually inhaled.

In 1969, Clinton didn't just think the personal was political; she argued that the two needed to be shaken up in tandem. Clinton rejected "our prevailing, acquisitive and competitive corporate life" and talked about how "every protest, every dissent ... is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age."

By 1992, she was no longer so opti- mistic that focusing on the personal could have political effects. That year, Clinton quoted to the graduates Vaclav Havel's warning about the limited effectiveness of "mere ' selfcare.' "Even achieving personal balance now seemed like a challenge. "Describing an integrated life," she warned, "is easier than achieving one."

And in 2017, Clinton confined discussion of the graduates' private lives to a single line of her speech. Instead, she focused on reassuring them that though "you don't own a cable news network, you don't control the Facebook algorithm, you aren't a member of Congress – yet," they could still make a difference. The prospect of changing the world by radically reorganizing our private lives and personal goals had receded. Staying engaged, and fighting against the titanic forces arrayed against us, seemed like challenge enough for a single speech.

Back in 1969, Clinton spoke dreamily about the gap between expectation and reality, and "what we have to accept of what we see." She set her fellow graduates the challenge of practicing "politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible."

The Clinton of 1992 acknowledged that this task was harder than it looks, "especially in today's far more cynical climate" – and this was even before the disappointments of her hopes for a sweeping reform of the American health-care system, the discovery of the vast right-wing conspiracy and her husband's impeachment.

She couldn't have anticipated the 2016 presidential election, in which false news stories about her health and her integrity proliferated, or 2017, when the man who eventually beat her began to bleat about "fake news" when faced with inconvenient truths.

Given these changes, Clinton's 2017 address focused on the much more modest goal of affirming what is true. Instead of talking about refusing to accept dour realities, as her younger self had done, Clinton described how authoritarian leaders "attempt to control reality."

"There is," she warned, "a fullfledged assault on truth and reason."

Clinton wasn't wrong to urge the Wellesley Class of 2017 to stay engaged. It's vital to the American civic project that people continue to vote, to march and to run for office. And in some political environments, persistence in the face of great odds is the most pragmatic form of resistance.

But Clinton's experiences in the 48 years since she first addressed a Wellesley graduating class are proof that making the impossible possible is a lot harder and more complicated than it looks.

Clinton's efforts to make the first lady a policymaking partner to the president were met with scalding backlash. And though Clinton became the third female secretary of state and the first woman to be a major party's presidential nominee, she did little to revolutionize what a secretary of state or a presidential candidate can do or be. Breaking barriers is just the first step toward radically changing institutions.

"Change is certain," Clinton warned in 1992. "Progress is not." I'm glad she's still standing. I'm so sad her dreams of 1969 gave way to this nightmare.