No One Loves a Convention Like Bill Clinton

“Bill Clinton at the DNC” is one of those phrases that evokes a body of performative work, like “Springsteen at the Garden” or “Tiger at the Masters.” When he steps on the stage this Wednesday, it will be the 12th time that Clinton has addressed a Democratic convention. He made his debut in 1980, when he was just 33 and the nation’s youngest governor. He comes to Chicago this year as the embodiment of his party’s history. At his 1992 convention, Clinton harkened back to the election of 1960 and “John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship.” The same gap in time, 32 years, separates that 1992 speech and this one. Imagine if JFK had lived to give Clinton his endorsement; that is the role Clinton will be playing for Kamala Harris in 2024.

Like Springsteen and Tiger, he’s not what he used to be, but the crowds will still turn out to watch this surgically repaired, raspy-voiced version. Though he just turned 78 this week, he is not his party’s eldest statesman. Joe Biden is two years older, and Jimmy Carter is alive. He is not its greatest orator (that’s Barack Obama) or its most beloved figure (that’s Michelle). He comes to town with more baggage than your mother-in-law. But Harris is running on joy, and no Democrat revels in the hokum and the hoopla of a convention the way Clinton does. Over the decades, he has played many roles: boy wonder, New Democrat reformer, president, grudging ex-president, aspiring First Gentleman, underminer, strategist, “explainer-in-chief.” But Clinton is forever a headliner.

1988: Debacle

Clinton’s career as a big-time convention speaker — and a national political figure — began with an infamous meltdown. In his autobiography, My Life, Clinton recalled that “nobody paid much attention” when he spoke in 1980, and his 1984 speech was a brief, forgettable tribute to Harry Truman. But in 1988, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis selected Clinton for a high-profile speaking slot, the Wednesday-night nomination speech. The governor of Arkansas was supposed to vouch for Dukakis as a centrist, and to offer himself as an implicit counterpoint to the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who had run for the nomination as a liberal populist and who had raised the roof of the Atlanta convention hall the previous night. Clinton came to the hall with what he estimated was a 22-minute speech. To his dismay, the lights in the hall came on as he began. The delegates started chatting, creating a distracting murmur. He realized he had lost the audience. “I felt as if the speech was a 200-pound rock I was pushing up a hill,” Clinton later wrote.

But Clinton kept going, and going, and going. The television networks cut to shots of bored-looking delegates in the audience. “Are people listening to this?” NBC anchor Tom Brokaw asked a correspondent on the floor. Dan Rather asked Walter Mondale to describe the “sinking feeling” that the little-known governor had to be experiencing. The Dukakis team, worried that Clinton’s speech would drain the energy from the hall and push the nomination roll-call vote out of prime time, desperately tried to get Clinton to cut it short. Someone loaded the instruction “Please Finish” into the teleprompter. Jim Wright, the Speaker of the House, came to the side of the stage and drew a finger across his throat. “In conclusion …” Clinton said, and the grateful delegates erupted into their loudest ovation of the night. He had bombed.

“It was funny, but it was sad, like watching a political career imploding,” the Washington Post television critic Tom Shales wrote in a column the next morning. Johnny Carson, the Tonight Show host, made merciless fun of his verbosity. But Clinton’s friend Harry Thomason, a Hollywood television producer, managed to get him booked on Carson’s show. Clinton made self-deprecating jokes and played the sax with the Tonight Show band. Four years later, he spoke again, this time as the nominee. “I ran for president this year for one reason and one reason only,” Clinton said. “I wanted to come back to this convention and finish that speech.”

1992: Hope

The Comeback Kid, as his supporters called him, was resilient — but also lucky. Clinton spent much of the summer of 1992 teetering on the verge of irrelevance, as the insurgent third-party candidacy of Ross Perot soared in the polls. But then Clinton made a canny decision about his running mate, going against the ticket-balancing conventional wisdom to pick another moderate southern baby boomer, Al Gore. The Democrats started to surge. The night of the delegate roll-call vote, Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea walked hand-in-hand through Macy’s on 34th Street and over to Madison Square Garden to accept the nomination in person. The next morning, Perot abruptly dropped out of the race. He would later change his mind and get back in, but for the time being, Clinton was all alone against the unpopular incumbent, President George H.W. Bush.

Clinton’s friend Thomason and his wife, TV writer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, had created a short biographical video to introduce the candidate, titled The Man From Hope, in reference to his hometown in Arkansas. Clinton went on to deliver an eloquent address that introduced a reformist agenda called the “New Covenant.” (“That was Clinton trying to be JFK,” says Robert Schlesinger, the author of White House Ghosts, a history of presidential speechwriting.) Today, no one remembers the New Covenant, but his closing would go down in history. “I still believe,” Clinton said, slowing the pace of his enunciation, “in a place … called … Hope.” The delegates in the Garden went nuts as they sang along to his Fleetwood Mac anthem, “Don’t Stop,” and Clinton and Gore thrust their clasped hands above their heads, Tipper and Hillary came out and gave each other a sisterly hug, and then the Gore children joined Chelsea onstage. It was a picture of boomers in bloom. Clinton, who had been tied with Bush in the pre-convention polling, left it with a lead of 27 points — an enormous bounce by the standards of the time and a swing that would seem unthinkable today, when nothing changes anyone’s minds.

1996: The Bridge

At this point in history, no Democratic president had run for and won a second term since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936. Clinton had looked destined to end up as another one-termer after his landslide losses in the 1994 midterms, but then House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his Republican revolutionaries had overreached, opening a lane for Clinton in the center. On the advice of Dick Morris, a strategist who often worked for Republicans, Clinton acquiesced to some elements of the conservative policy agenda. The week before the 1996 convention, Clinton signed a welfare-reform bill that was anathema to liberals, sparking resignations from his administration and denunciations from the left wing, which he was more than happy to accept.

The day before Clinton’s convention appearance in Chicago, a tabloid published an account of Morris’s escapades with a sex worker, and the strategist resigned. It didn’t matter — his strategy had already helped Clinton to amass a massive lead. Most liberals were so spooked by Gingrich, a proto-Trump, that they were willing to grind their teeth to unify around the president. The Republican candidate, 73-year-old Bob Dole, was a World War II veteran. “Age has its advantages,” Dole had said in his convention speech, in which he offered to serve as a “bridge” back to “a time of tranquility, faith, and confidence in action.” In his own convention address, Clinton pounced, redeploying a metaphor he had previously used in his speech about Dukakis. “Let us resolve,” he said, “to build a bridge to the 21st century.” Clinton never trailed Dole, and the rest of the convention was a snooze. Its main contribution to history is a cringeworthy video clip of Hillary and other Democrats doing the Macarena, which resurfaces every four years.

2000: Grand Finale

The 2000 convention, in Los Angeles, is in some ways the one most analogous to this year’s. Then, as now, the Democratic candidate was the vice-president. Then, as now, the sitting president opened the convention with a speech on Monday night. Then, as now, that sitting president was privately convinced that he was the party’s strongest candidate. Of course, the biggest difference between then and now is that Clinton couldn’t run because the Constitution prohibited it, not because he had lost the support of his party. In fact, after a term in which he had been investigated, disgraced, impeached, and acquitted, Clinton thought he was back at the top of his game. He was just a few days shy of his 54th birthday — younger than Kamala Harris is today. The Big Dog, as his aides called him, was leaving the White House, but he wasn’t planning to go away. And this dynamic created a poisonous tension with Al Gore.

The pair, who had made such a handsome couple back at the 1992 convention, were now estranged and barely on speaking terms. Gore considered Clinton a self-centered schemer who had nearly brought down the whole administration by having an affair with a White House intern. As Clinton had lied about it, Gore had stood behind him — literally — and now the vice-president felt he had to campaign while carrying a garbage bag. Clinton thought he had been forgiven by his wife and the public and couldn’t understand why Gore seemed to want to run away from their many accomplishments. He came to Los Angeles ready to make the case for Gore as his successor. He told people he wanted to go out like Babe Ruth, who, in his — slightly inaccurate — telling of history, had socked three home runs in his final game. But when Clinton’s team circulated a draft of his speech, the candidate’s advisers asked them to cut back the passages about Gore. “They really had so absorbed Gore’s own concern that Clinton was toxic,” recalls Jeff Shesol, one of Clinton’s speechwriters. “They really thought if they could have gotten Clinton out of town without talking about Al Gore at all, they would have been relieved.”

So the Big Dog did his own thing. He roared into Los Angeles early to raise money for Hillary’s campaign for a Senate seat in New York. She gave his introduction speech at the convention, taking the stage to the theme from New York, New York and speaking, with her usual leaden earnestness, of her generation’s “rendezvous with responsibility.” Then it was Bill’s turn. Working with Harry Thomason, Clinton had come up with a showstopping entrance, which he had kept secret from Gore’s advisers. Thomason had choreographed a long tracking shot capturing the commander-in-chief as he walked alone to the stage through the bowels of the Staples Center. He entered the arena like a conquering hero as a list of his accomplishments rolled across the bottom of the screen: Longest economic expansion in American history … Lowest infant mortality rate in American history … Highest home ownership rate in American history …

Some of the reviews were harsh. “It was portrayed as an act of narcissism,” Shesol said, which he thinks is an unfair critique, given Gore’s insistence on distance. In the hall, though, the speech was a home run, and that night Gore picked up five points in his internal polling. Bill celebrated by taking Hillary and Chelsea to a party held in front of a fake New York streetscape on the Paramount Studios backlot, where they were serenaded by the singer Michael Bolton.

2004: Surrogate

The world had changed drastically by the time the Democrats next met, in Boston. George W. Bush had won the presidency, by the margin of just 537 votes in Florida (and one vote on the Supreme Court). The nation was fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and gripped by fear of another terrorist attack like 9/11. Clinton and Gore had made up, sort of, and both were building new careers around their personal causes. For Gore, that was climate change. For Clinton, that was his philanthropic foundation — and Hillary, who was positioning herself to run for president.

She passed on the opportunity to run against a wartime president, though, so the task fell to John Kerry, the Massachusetts senator and Vietnam veteran. Bill Clinton’s convention assignment was to remind everyone of how prosperous and peaceful life had four years before. “My friends, after three conventions as a candidate or a president, tonight I come to you as a citizen,” he said, “returning to the role that I have played for most of my life; as a foot soldier in our fight for the future as we nominate in Boston a true New England patriot.” The speech was workmanlike, and swiftly forgotten, because the next night, in the convention’s keynote address, Illinois state senator Barack Obama blew everyone away with one of the greatest oratorical performances in memory. Four years later, Clinton would have to swallow his pride and speak for him.

2008 and 2012: Endorser

Clinton relished the fact that some supporters had called him “the first Black president,” and when he was confronted with the prospect of an actual Black president, jumping the line to take the nomination that he thought rightly belonged to his wife, he reacted poorly. He tried to minimize Obama’s victory in the South Carolina primary, comparing his performance to Jesse Jackson’s, then complained that Obama’s campaign had “played the race card on me.” While he traveled in Africa that summer, the former president pointedly declined to say he thought Obama was prepared to hold the office, saying only that “everybody’s got a right to run for president who qualifies under the Constitution.” Meanwhile, both Clintons had a warm relationship with Obama’s general-election opponent, Senator John McCain. Hillary thought her campaign, and the many millions of women who had voted for her, deserved to be acknowledged at the convention in Denver. The Obama campaign gave her Tuesday night. She did her duty, calling for the party to unify. The following night, Bill vouched for the new guy, saying, “Barack Obama is the man for this job.” That was all Obama needed from him in 2008.

In 2012, though, it was a different story. Obama’s reelection campaign was listless. He had spent four grueling years managing the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis, and he was taking the blame for the pain. The cool charisma that had made Obama such an appealing candidate in 2008 looked, by 2012, like aloofness. The campaign needed an empathy injection.

Enter the Big Dog. Although Hillary was now secretary of State, Obama and Bill were still not personally close. He was surprised when Obama called him from Air Force One that July to offer him a marquee speaking slot on the next-to-last night of the convention. Bill threw himself into the assignment with all his former vigor. The day before he was to speak, he convened a group of veteran advisers in his hotel suite in Charlotte. The extremely orderly Obama campaign was hoping to get a look at a draft well ahead of time, but that wasn’t how the Clintonites operated. “The answer is always that it’s getting written in a midnight pizza party,” says Erik Smith, the Democratic political consultant who oversaw the 2008 and 2012 convention for Obama.

“Explanation is eloquence,” Clinton repeated over and over to his advisers. He had resolved to make the case for Obama that the president was unable to set out himself. Obama’s team was nervous that Clinton was too enthusiastic and that he might repeat the mistake of 1988. He was scheduled to go on at 10:25 p.m., which would give him a tight half-hour before the national networks cut away for their 11 p.m. local-news broadcasts. The final draft, 3,279 words in length, was loaded into a teleprompter. “I want to nominate a man who’s cool on the outside,” Clinton began, “but who burns for America on the inside.” Almost immediately, he went off the script, storytelling and extemporizing, citing facts and numbers from memory with easygoing confidence. “Listen to me, now,” Clinton said. “No president — no president, not me, not any of my predecessors, no one — could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years.” He went long past 11 p.m., but no network dared to cut away. When he was finally finished, Obama appeared onstage and Clinton bowed in tribute. But he was the star of the show.

2016: Husband

In 2016, Clinton was asked to perform an even more difficult magic trick: disappearance. As the first female presidential nominee, Hillary had to stand on her own, and a prominent role for her husband could only create unfavorable comparisons and dynastic overtones. So Obama was given the big Wednesday-night slot, and Bill spoke on Tuesday, delivering a quiet, humanizing tribute to a woman who had stuck with him “through good times and bad, joy and heartbreak.” In doing so, the Washington Post writer and Bill Clinton biographer David Maraniss wrote the next day, “he was essentially making good on a marital and political promissory note.”

Unfortunately for the Democrats, Clinton’s most consequential act during the 2016 campaign came not during the July convention in Philadelphia, but on a scorching-hot airplane tarmac in Phoenix in June. During a refueling stop, he caught sight of the government plane belonging to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and walked across to say hi. Their brief chat, which Lynch later described as an exchange of pleasantries, ended up causing a chain reaction at the Justice Department that changed the course of the FBI’s investigation of Hillary’s handling of classified information on her home email server and the press’s coverage of Wikileaks’ publication of other emails, obtained by hackers who infiltrated the DNC and Hillary’s campaign. The first Wikileaks tranche appeared during the Democratic convention, overshadowing whatever Clinton had to say. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Donald Trump said at a gleeful press conference. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” When Hillary lost that November, it brought the Clintons’ 24-year run as national political leaders to an end.

2020: Zoom

Have you forgotten the 2020 convention? You’re not alone. Watching clips of that strange, socially distanced event can trigger unwelcome memories of Zoom happy hours and backyard school. The Biden campaign consigned Clinton to a short, taped video appearance in a brief first-hour segment on “leading from the Oval Office,” which also featured Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. Looking thin and pale, he spoke into the camera from his house in Chappaqua. There was no riffing, no audience, no energy. It was like booking Springsteen to play in a phone booth.

Clinton was isolated in more ways than one. He had become hyperconscious about his diet and health since undergoing heart surgery; he was so COVID-cautious that longtime friends said he was not even going outside to golf. Many Democrats blamed the Clintons — Bill as much as Hillary — for blowing the 2016 election and giving them President Trump. The centrist New Democrat band of politics that Clinton represented had fallen from favor. The younger, social-justice-oriented politicians of the left had repudiated many of his policy accomplishments, such as passing a crime bill that included mandatory-minimum sentences (legislation Biden had also had supported at the time). Clinton’s rakish history also looked less charming in retrospect, and episodes like the Monica Lewinsky scandal had been reassessed in light of Me Too. Taken together, it added to up to the “devolution of Clinton into something approaching a political pariah,” this magazine’s Ed Kilgore wrote. The Big Dog was in the doghouse.

Still, Clinton delivered some memorable zingers at Trump, whom he considered an unworthy successor. “If you want a president who defines the job as spending hours a day watching TV and zapping people on social media, he’s your man,” Clinton said. This year, as he seeks to bolster yet another successor — a former prosecutor with a reputation for framing policy in terms of common sense, not poetry — look for Clinton to ridicule Trump at greater length, and to place Harris in his presidential lineage, and a distant era of relative calm. A politician who once said he was building a bridge to the 21st century has become its living link to the past.