Bill Clinton Auditions for the Role of 'First Guy.'

Do you think if Hilary Wins, Clinton Would Be President Again in Disguise?

Of all the thankless tasks that a political spouse must endure, the ritual of the convention speech is perhaps the worst.

Every four years, in front of a crowd of thousands and an audience of millions, the candidate’s spouse has to testify to their essential goodness, weaving the most personal anecdotes with broader campaign themes.

The fact that Bill Clinton was a practiced convention speaker with nine speeches under his belt already did not make his task easier Tuesday. If anything, it made it harder.

Those speeches were more straightforward affairs, endorsing the party’s candidate, arguing for his own campaigns, serving as “Explainer-in-Chief” for the platform. To testify on his wife’s behalf, Clinton had to unlearn some of those habits, and as the first man in his position on a major party platform, he had no role models.

Hilary and Clinton 40 Years Ago

His job was to humanize Hillary Clinton, to turn her from a cardboard cutout—“the most famous, least-known person in the country”—back into something relatable.

In 2008, Michelle Obama described Barack Obama as “the same man who drove me and our new baby daughter home from the hospital 10 years ago this summer, inching along at a snail’s pace, peering anxiously at us in the rearview mirror, feeling the whole weight of her future in his hands.”

In 2000, Laura Bush recalled that “Hop on Pop” was one of George W. Bush’s favorite children’s books, and told the Republican National Convention that “George would lie on the floor and the girls would literally hop on pop, turning story time into a contact sport.”

But Bill Clinton had a trickier task. He could not paint the first female presidential nominee as an anxious new mom without risking reducing her political stature. And he could not make broad proclamations about building a better future without sounding like he was running himself.

Instead he had to perform the kind of rhetorical alchemy that only a gifted speaker could pull off: turning the story of her success into the story of their love.

The crowd was largely silent as Bill Clinton cast his spell, conjuring up the image of a bright young go-getter and the hapless fool who fell for her. Bill dwelled heavily on the couple’s early courtship, painting a picture of a good-hearted, idealistic Hillary Clinton who swept him off his feet. She wore a flowered skirt and had big hair. He followed her to register for classes, even though he had already signed up. She took him home to Illinois to argue about the Bears and Cubs with her two brothers.

He also credited her—perhaps too much—for his own ambition, arguing that she had believed in him and pushed him into office. Through her work helping children and migrant workers, he said, “Hillary opened my eyes to a whole new world of public service by private citizens.” Whatever he had accomplished, he seemed to imply, was largely thanks to her.

“Let’s get back to business,” he said after he finished listing early examples of her do-goodery to return to his grandfatherly reminiscences. “Meanwhile, I was trying to get her to marry me.” The first portion of the speech focused not on any jobs or campaigns, but on his three marriage proposals to Hillary. He managed to spin an image of Hillary Clinton as both a superhero and an ingenue.

Then he elided more than a decade, skipping over his own presidency so that he could drill into her stints in the Senate and the State Department. Every mention of his own political career was couched as part of a personal narrative of their life together. If somehow you didn’t know that he’d been President in the 1990s, you might not have realized it from this speech.

Instead, Bill assumed the posture of an awestruck bystander who happened to be around while Hillary worked her magic. When they dropped Chelsea off at college, he recalls, “there I was in a trance staring out the window the window trying not to cry, and there was Hillary, on her hands and knees looking for one more drawer to put that liner paper in.” Unlike Michelle Obama or Laura Bush, he softened his spouse by opening up about his own vulnerabilities, not hers.

Do you think if Hilary Wins, Clinton Would Be President Again in Disguise?