Of all the stirring speeches at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, Hillary Clinton‘s was perhaps the most surprising. At an event that included Michelle And Mr. Barack Obama, Doug Emhoff, And Lil Jon, Clinton’s vision—before her speech, anyway—conjured up the ghost of 2016—something to forget, something too painful to recall in this great moment. For nearly eight years, Clinton has been a walking, talking reminder not only of her own loss of Donald Trump, But for all that the country had lost because of him, her words were filled with a sense of loss and fear and unhappiness. But from the very beginning, her words had a special power. “Something is happening in America—you can feel it,” she said. “Something we have been working for and dreaming about for a long time.”
Clinton, with whom I spoke this morning, told me, “This is certainly the speech that I felt I needed to give, and that only I could give.”
From the start, Clinton appeared more at ease than many had seen him before. Gone were the headwinds of the previous Clinton era, the drama of a surrounded Bill and Hill against the world. Now semi-retired, Secretary Clinton can speak her mind without fear of attack—and explore her emotions more candidly than ever. “There’s still a sense of unresolved 2016,” she said, “and that’s one of the common themes I hear. That’s certainly what people tell me.”
The first sign of that general feeling was the reaction of the crowd at Unified CenterA cleansing roar that lasted a full minute. Although the room was large, Clinton felt very close, seeing friendly faces in the rows in front of her.
“The way the stage opened up so close to the first row of delegates, I could actually see their faces, and see the faces of people 120 rows back,” Clinton recalled. “I didn’t feel like I was on a stage apart from the crowd, I felt right in the middle of the crowd. And it was a really emotional embrace that I felt from the moment I walked out there.”
“Overall,” she added, “it was even more emotional than I thought it would be.”
Clinton spent two weeks working on the speech, working largely with a speechwriter. Dan Schwerin, with assistants and writers Nick Merrill, Caty Gordon, And Lauren Peterson, a DNC writer was assigned. Her first reader, of course, was Bill Clinton. “Originally, it was going to be Joe Biden“It’s her convention,” Clinton said, but the mission has changed: “How would I feel about another woman hoping to step into the Oval Office?” she said. “And I feel really good.”
Clinton’s mission is to pass the torch to Kamala Harris, to bring her into the arc of history and the women’s rights movement, from the footsteps of Shirley Chisholm and Geraldine Ferraro versus Clinton herself. On the day of the speech, Schwerin said, Clinton “was sitting around a table where she was reading, editing, rehearsing and stamping her speech, because in the end it was a very personal speech, her life’s work.”
This always made it, at least in part, the dashed hopes of 2016, when Clinton took up the torch and women and girls across America expected to wake up to the news of the first female president of the United States the morning after Election Night. “As I was writing the speech and rehearsing it, I got emotional a lot of the time,” Clinton said, “and had to push through it to be able to deliver it on stage.”
“It was really cathartic for me,” she continued, “and based on both the reception I got in the hall and the outreach I got, it was cathartic for a lot of people.”
Afterwards, she said, people told her they had to “force themselves to watch the movie” because of painful memories of 2016, but then found it “healing” to hear her not only resurrect the feminist storyline of her own campaign but recreate it for Harris, imagining her swearing in through the nearly 66 million cracks in the glass wall that Clinton herself had erected.
“I mean, I just had people — online, texting, emailing, in person — really expressing how what I said made them feel in that moment, made them feel about all of their unresolved emotions around 2016,” she said. “So it was a collective experience, and it made me feel like I did what I came to do — that, you know, don’t be afraid. Don’t stoop. Do everything you can to try to elect Kamala because it’s the right thing to do, it’s the best thing to do, and it’s what our country needs right now.”
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Clinton is uniquely suited to convey to voters the “urgency” of this moment and give them “the right to invest 100 percent” without worrying about being fooled again. “Don’t be afraid,” she said of her message. “You know, a lot of strange things happened in 2016—we have to be prepared. We have to be smarter, faster.”
Clinton had some nice things to say about Trump, most notably her line about Trump falling asleep during his own trial and waking up to find he had “made his own history” as a convicted felon. But the line that best encapsulated the feeling in the room in Chicago that led to the cheers was: “We got him running now.” That’s the line Democrats wanted and needed to hear — especially from Hillary Clinton.
“I think the Democrats are on the defensive, hands up, not wanting to be bombarded again by the chaos, the corruption that Trump has brought, the overwhelming attention that he has demanded from the press, not just flooding the airwaves but flooding the brain,” Clinton told me.
Merrill, a longtime Clinton adviser, said the speech “broke the ice” about Trump’s hold on the Democratic psyche. And that may be true.
Hillary ClintonRising to a moment no one dreamed of a month ago has freed the Democratic Party to move forward—and in doing so, she has freed herself.
