Bill Clinton’s quiet warning

Former President Bill Clinton speaks on the third day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center, in Chicago, on Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024. (Todd Heisler/The New York Times)

By Bret Stephens

Even now, more than three decades after Bill Clinton became a fixture on the national stage, it’s startling to be reminded of the 42nd president’s preternatural political gifts.

On Wednesday night, Clinton spoke to the Democratic National Convention’s audience of thousands as if they were a few good friends gathered in his living room. His tone was warm, relaxed, conversational, uplifting. “Aren’t you proud to be a Democrat?” he asked in nearly his first breath, and the audience was his from that moment on.

His speech did everything an elder party statesman’s speech is supposed to do, most of all by making the case for Kamala Harris and — more brilliantly — against Donald Trump. “Don’t count the lies, count the ‘I’s’” he said of the former president’s fondness for speaking about himself. “His vendettas, his vengeance, his complaints, his conspiracies.” About Trump’s management style, he aptly observed, “He creates chaos and then he sort of curates it, as if it were precious art.”

Then, toward the end of his remarks, Clinton took a more somber, admonitory — and necessary — turn. “We saw more than one election slip away from us,” he said. He warned Democrats to “never underestimate your adversary.” He reminded delegates that “there are still a lot of slips between today and Election Day that we have to navigate.”

Most importantly, with his wife’s politically catastrophic “basket of deplorables” remark surely in mind, he offered some much-needed advice: “As someone who spends a lot of time in small towns in rural areas in New York and Arkansas and other places, I urge you to talk to all of your neighbors, to meet people where they are. I urge you not to demean them.”

That’s good advice in any election cycle, but perhaps never more so than in this one. Democrats want Americans to believe that democracy itself hangs in the balance in this election. Perhaps it does, but undecided voters who recall similar dire warnings from 2016 will most likely be unimpressed. What they’ll be asking instead is how a Harris presidency will be better than the Joe Biden one with which they weren’t altogether happy.

Almost inevitably, Clinton ended by invoking his political mythology as “the man from Hope” to pay tribute to Harris as next year’s “president of joy.” Joy is great, but what Harris needs to do is convince wavering voters that she’ll bring down their cost of living.