Barack Obama ripped off a barn-burner on Tuesday night and it gave me shivers, it truly did. He's an incredibly talented speaker and he channels several generations of idealism on the left - and possibly even the right. But Hillary Clinton's speech later on, claiming a shocking, surprise victory, was more important in the long run. We knew Obama could bring it. But few of us knew this Hillary Clinton.
I meant to quote Chuck Tryon's post over at the Chutry Experiment about the speech the other night, because it was one of the best descriptions of both its style and its importance:
While I remain convinced that this week’s gendered attacks on Clinton’s “emotional moment” were reprehensible, I do think that Clinton handled those attacks brilliantly and gave what I found to be an impressive, impassioned speech, one that essentially took the attacks (Hillary is too emotional or not emotional enough) and turned them on their head, in part by suggesting that the week’s events had allowed her to “find [her] own voice.” This assertion was not so subtly reinforced by the mise-en-scene of Clinton’s victory speech, in which Bill Clinton, Wesley Clark, and Madeleine Albright were conspicuously absent, replaced by a backdrop of Bennetton-esque college kids and identifying Hillary with the youth vote that Obama had supposedly cornered.
But one of Hillary’s strongest moments came when she asserted (and this is a rushed personal transcript scrawled on the back of an envelope), “Too many have been invisible for too long. Well, you are not invisible to me….There will be no more invisible Americans.” It’s a nice twist on John Edwards’ “Two Americas,” but without the baggage of polarization. More importantly, like Obama, Hillary has begun connecting her campaign to a larger narrative about empowerment, avoiding Edwards trial lawyer rhetoric of fighting for and replacing that with something more inclusive (fighting together). Her description of America’s “can-do spirit” almost perfectly echoed Obama’s mantra, “Yes, we can.” Hillary also channeled her inner Kennedy by calling for viewers to “join in this call to greatness” and to “roll up our sleeves and keep going.”
It's also clear from the Washington Post's fascinating tick-tock inside the Clinton campaign that this new voice came from the candidate herself.
