President Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention was a travelogue and a love poem, taking the audience — and the rest of America — on his journey through meeting and wooing Hillary Rodham. It was his twist on the traditional spiel by the candidate’s spouse, who is there to remind everyone that the person they are nominating is actually a real human being. 
 
 And, Clinton being Clinton, it was overstuffed and detail-laden, going through the Clintons’ history year by year... 
 
 ...with one very obvious exception. 
 
 The 1998 portion of this speech should be interesting.... — Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 27, 2016 
 
 There was no 1998 portion of the speech. Clinton covered 1997, when Chelsea Clinton started college, then said, literally, “Now fast-forward,” and launched into the events of 1999. 
 
 That meant one of the darkest chapters of the Clintons’ political careers and, presumably, personal lives — when Bill Clinton had oral sex with intern Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, lied about it under oath, and was impeached — was entirely absent from the speech. Fast-forward indeed. 
 
 Clinton got up onstage on Tuesday night to support his wife. Referencing what must be one of the more humiliating periods of her life, just as she was formally nominated to be the first woman president of the United States, could have come off as jarring and graceless. Even a tactful allusion — one that said, essentially, he hadn’t always been a model husband — could easily have seemed like he was building himself up by tearing her down. 
 
 But this was the difficult task Clinton faced by giving a traditional spousal speech: He had to tell the story of one of the best-known marriages in America, a marriage split by a nationally televised drama about sex and infidelity and power, while constructing a political argument about one of America’s most disliked politicians. 
 
 Bill Clinton’s speech was very similar to Ann Romney’s. Really. 
 
 The arc of Bill Clinton’s speech is familiar, because it’s the same story — with a few more policy details — that Ann Romney told in 2012 and Michelle Obama told in 2008. 
 
 Boy meets girl. Boy marries girl, with a humorous anecdote or two about the vicissitudes of young love. Boy and girl start a family. The spouse admires the candidate’s character and commitment. The couple undergoes some kind of difficulty that, in the end, only makes them stronger. 
 
 “A storybook marriage?” Ann Romney said in 2012. “No, not at all. What Mitt Romney and I have is a real marriage.” 
 
 In both cases, after less personal sections with a bit more relevance to politics — Romney talked about her husband’s business, Obama about her husband’s community organizing — both spouses underlined that they truly know this person and are uniquely capable of vouching for his character. 
 
 “The Barack Obama I know today is the same man I fell in love with 19 years ago,” Michelle Obama said in 2008. 
 
 “It has been 47 years since that tall, kind of charming young man brought me home from our first dance,” said Ann Romney in 2012, closing with: “He will take us to a better place, just as he took me home safely from that dance.” 
 
 On Tuesday, Bill Clinton struck the same note: 
 
 I have lived a long, full, blessed life. It really took off when I met and fell in love with that girl in the spring of 1971. … For this time, Hillary is uniquely qualified to seize the opportunities and reduce the risks we face, and she is still the best darn change-maker I have ever known. 
 
 But he had the unique difficulty of telling a story that Americans know much better. 
 
 Ann Romney had to show the audience that her husband really cared about people. Michelle Obama had to prove that she and Barack were regular, everyday Americans like everyone else. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton’s message was something closer to awe: Can you believe, he seemed to ask, that my wife did all this? 
 
 Alluding to 1998 might have fit firmly into that framework. It could have reminded Americans of what Hillary Clinton went through — and why her popularity jumped 10 percentage points during that period. 
 
 But it also would have made the speech all about Bill — when, perhaps for the first time in his career, he was giving a speech that was barely about himself at all. 
 
 As it was, there was just one tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it allusion. “You should elect her because she will never quit when the going gets tough,” Clinton said. “She will never quit on you.” 
 
 He went on to talk about coal miners in West Virginia. He could just as easily have been talking about himself. ||||| PHILADELPHIA — Hillary Clinton transcended her own flaws, and a spirited progressive insurgency, to become the first female major-party nominee in the 240-year history of the United States. 
 
 “History,” Clinton tweeted at around 7 p.m. Tuesday, after her subdued rival Bernie Sanders rose from a seat in the Vermont delegation to request that all of his delegates, the hard-won token of his political life’s work, switch their allegiances to Clinton. 
 
 Story Continued Below 
 
 The storyline inside the Wells Fargo Center was “chaos” during the first 36 hours of the Democratic National Convention, with the forced resignation of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and talk of a last-minute mass rebellion by renegade Sanders supporters. And it was true to a point. But the roll-call vote that many in the hall saw as a flash point for conflict turned into a standard exercise in post-primary consolidation, thanks to the quiet coordination of once-feuding Sanders and Clinton campaign officials. 
 
 Still, this was a Hillary Clinton convention, so there was one final spasm of rancor as dozens of the hardest-core Sanders supporters stalked noisily out of the hall and over to the flimsy white tents that housed the press filing center. At first reporters and cameramen raced over to cover them — but they decided to block access and linger for two shouting hours, pissing off the very messengers they needed to make a case for Sanders that the Vermont senator explicitly demanded they not make on his behalf. 
 
 The animating force behind the Sanders movement (and the runner-up spent much of Tuesday soaking up adulation for moving Clinton to the left on trade and the minimum wage) was principle and grievance. But on Tuesday, it boiled down to the building-block elements of politics — winning and losing. 
 
 Outside, the Bernie-or-Bust protesters yelled into journalists’ iPhones. Inside, Donna Brazile, the stand-in chair of the party, danced slowly offstage after celebrating Clinton’s victory. 
 
 Here are five takeaways from Clinton’s winning night. 
 
 1. Bill Clinton is an awkward surrogate. The former president has been battling the teleprompter nearly as long as he’s been fighting the Republicans — and he wrestled it to the ground decisively on Tuesday night. His goal was to outline a personal case for his wife as a dedicated and trustworthy person, and he largely succeeded, at least to fans who applauded, standing as he strode slowly onto the stage, and hung on his every word. 
 
 But if his highly effective 2012 address on Barack Obama’s behalf was a masterstroke of persuasive concision (by Clinton standards), this was a weedy rambler. As anyone who has ever delivered a wedding toast knows, it’s sometimes tougher to talk about family than friends — and that seemed to be the case as he wove the familiar tale of her courtship in the Yale Law School library into a meta pitch for her gifts as a “change-maker.” He documented their shared history and her accomplishments with the exhaustive, off-script granularity that made his memoir “My Life” every Clinton reporter’s favorite doorstop and his tedious, hourlong, 1988 DNC address a near-career killer. This wasn’t that bad. 
 
 Bill Clinton has always been a wear-you-out (if flashes-of-genius) talker, and those tendencies only become more pronounced with age. But his prolixity actually illustrates a bigger problem that afflicts the candidate herself as she struggles to find a pithy, appealing message to voters. 
 
 Setting aside the obvious elisions in Bill’s year-by-year biography (he completely omitted the Lewinsky/impeachment era), the story of the Clintons is old, oft-told, oft-fact-checked — a disputed narrative whose mere recitation reminds a change-craving electorate of how long they’ve been on the national stage. 
 
 His speech did no damage — and fired up the faithful — but it was a shadow of Michelle Obama’s deeply moving address to the convention the night before. And it also raised an awkward question: Will the Big Dog ever really be comfortable ceding the spotlight to his wife? 
 
 To his credit, Clinton has labored mightily to be a Team Hillary player for most of 2016. But it’s not a discipline that comes naturally to him, as anyone (me) who spent two hours in a rural Iowa fire station watching him hold up a color copy of a chart showing economic growth during his administration can tell you. 
 
 2. Bernie’s graceful exit (stage, far left). It took Bernie Sanders quite a while to internalize the fact that he hadn’t actually beaten Clinton despite receiving 3.7 million fewer votes — but he’s been a more or less exemplary partner to Clinton as she tried to tame the Never Hillary crowd. The nascent Sanders-Clinton alliance is neither intuitive (she questioned whether he was even a real Democrat during the primaries) nor especially warm, but it’s proving durable enough for their mutual purposes. 
 
 Clinton’s aides were intent to give Sanders something Donald Trump was never willing to offer Ted Cruz — dignity and respect in defeat, a graceful exit, an evening to bask in his accomplishments. It worked. Cruz was defiant and divisive, Sanders was domesticated and uncharacteristically sentimental. “We have no complaints about Bernie or his people,” one Clinton campaign official in the arena on Tuesday told me. 
 
 During the roll-call vote, the fiery insurgent sat like a progressive prince enthroned as state delegation members lauded his accomplishments and tallied his 1,894 delegates, eyes moistening as he shared whispered observations with wife Jane. Coupled with Sanders’ campaign to shape the party’s platform in his image, the Clinton camp’s charm offensive softened his stony support for Clinton into something more convincing. And, after a day’s worth of not especially rancorous negotiation, Sanders agreed to enter his rival’s name into nomination, as Clinton herself had done eight years earlier for Barack Obama. 
 
 3. The protests were outside. Sanders, worried that booing or back-turning by his supporters would hurt the cause, feverishly attempted to defuse and divert anger over his loss. Whatever he did worked: The 200 die-hard delegates who refused to jump on the bandwagon staged a protest walkout, leaving the arena more visibly and audibly united than it’s been yet. 
 
 4. Hillary’s here. The first 36 hours of Clinton’s coronation — by design or accident — were curiously free of the nominee’s image or presence: That is to say, Clinton’s face appeared fleetingly if at all in many of the convention videos, in sharp contrast to Trump, who insisted on helicoptering into every scene of his shaggy Cleveland carnival. 
 
 The curious Hillary-free first day was a pretty shrewd move according to a few Democrats I spoke to: Her team may have wanted to avoid antagonizing Sanders supporters — and feelings were running so hot that her mere image might have shattered the fragile truce. Moreover, they were perfectly happy to let Bernie — who wanted his moment in the sun — be the face of the convention during its fractious opening hours. 
 
 As soon as the roll call was completed — boom — Clinton’s face was everywhere, and the candidate herself appeared via video linkup after her husband left the stage. 
 
 5. Macker’s unforced error. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe is one of Bill Clinton’s best friends, and like the former president, speaks expansively about topics more wisely left undiscussed. Minutes after the Sanders threat dissipated, McAuliffe decided to tell POLITICO that Hillary Clinton might not have been entirely serious about her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal, a core Sanders (and Trump) economic-populist article of faith. 
 
 “I worry that if we don’t do TPP, at some point China’s going to break the rules — but Hillary understands this,” the Macker told my colleague Annie Karni, who approached him after he’d finished a TV interview. “Once the election’s over, and we sit down on trade, people understand a couple things we want to fix on it, but going forward we got to build a global economy. ... Yes. Listen, she was in support of it. There were specific things in it she wants fixed.” 
 
 To say it was an unforced error is gross understatement: Trump tweeted out the story and will almost certainly bring it up as proof “Crooked Hillary” can’t be trusted. 
 
 And Clinton’s team wasted little time in making clear that McAuliffe had gone rogue and needed to zip it. Campaign Chairman John Podesta told Karni that Clinton has never suggested she would roll back her opposition — then tweeted out an affectionately brutal corrective. 
 
 “Love Gov. McAuliffe, but he got this one flat wrong,” Podesta wrote. “Hillary opposes TPP BEFORE and AFTER the election. Period. Full stop.” 
 
 Authors: ||||| Bill Clinton Pours On the Estrogen 
 
 By Maureen Dowd 
 
 PHILADELPHIA — His life took off, he said, when he fell in love with “that girl.” 
 
 He told a familiar love story, recounted in his memoir, about springtime at Yale Law School in 1971 and a “magnetic” girl with thick blond hair and big glasses and no makeup and a long, white flowery skirt. 
 
 He said when he first saw her in a political and civil rights class that he wanted to tap her on the shoulder but he knew if he did, he would be starting something beyond his control. 
 
 With a sky-blue tie and silvery hair and an easy smile, the 69-year-old looked healthier than he has on the trail. And he was sharp. 
 
 The Big Dog basked in the unique historic moment: a former president and a husband and a wannabe first lad making the case for a former first lady, a wife and a wannabe first woman president. 
 
 In an act of amazing self-restraint, the man who relishes the word “I” managed to make the talk, as he prefers to call his folksy speeches, all about her. He was positively uxorious. 
 
 She “calls you when you’re sick, when your kid’s in trouble or when there’s a death in the family,” Bill said of his partner of 40 years. 
 
 It has been said that the essence of the Clinton marriage is coming to each other’s rescue in critical moments. Or maybe more precisely, their byzantine conjugal dynamic works like this: One of them creates chaos — usually Bill — and then they get out of it together. Or as a former aide described the Clinton pattern: “Hubris. Funk. Reintroduction.” 
 
 “You could drop her in any trouble spot, pick one, come back in a month and somehow, some way, she will have made it better,” he said, in a line that could have applied to global crises or marital. (An earlier celebrity speaker tonight was Tony Goldwyn, who plays the philandering president in a series inspired by Bill and Monica). 
 
 After the email shaming and a bloodless campaign, tonight it was Bill’s turn to rescue Hillary from being the most unknown known person in history. One of the most liked presidents was charged with humanizing one of the least liked presidential candidates. 
 
 “One of the most seductive characters we’ve seen in American politics in our lifetime,” as David Axelrod calls Bill Clinton, had to melt the sphinx-like aura of his guarded wife. 
 
 The uncontrollable Clinton had to make the tightly-controlled Clinton seem less coiled and more endearing. The Protean pol had to take his wife’s ever-shifting personas and policies, and paint a cohesive portrait. He rivaled Ivanka in his talent for airbrushing, but he probably won’t be offering his convention outfit for sale tonight. 
 
 Hill and Bill both have 100-percent name ID but Bill’s task was to reintroduce her as “the best darn change-maker I have ever met in my entire life.” 
 
 A quarter-century after Clinton aides wrote memos about how to warm up and round out Hillary by raising her profile as a mother, Bill was still trying to drive that point home. 
 
 “My daughter had the best mother in the whole world,” he said tonight, adding that Hillary was “first and foremost” a mother, “our family’s designated worrier” who only worried about Bill’s parenting when he took a couple days off with Chelsea to watch all six “Police Academy” movies “back-to-back.” He described Hillary on her knees, lining Chelsea’s Stanford dorm room drawers with paper when their daughter moved to college, until Chelsea told them it was time to leave. 
 
 It is another example of the overcorrecting that marks Hillary’s career. In trying to feminize and maternalize Hillary, Bill almost went overboard about that “girl,” as he called her three times. He poured on the estrogen, presaging his role as helpmeet in the East Wing. 
 
 He never mentioned Donald Trump, the man he used to be friendly with and play golf with. He simply alluded to the way the Republican convention had tried to turn Hillary into a “cartoon” villainess. “Life in the real world is complicated and hard,” he said, and “a lot of people think it’s boring.” 
 
 “One is real, the other is made up,” he said of the caricature of Hillary. “You nominated the real one.” 
 
 He implicitly compared his wife to her gilded rival, limning her as someone genuinely seeking a life of service. He talked about her summer sliming fish in Alaska and all her work for poor children. 
 
 Hillary has said that she never realized how hard it was to be as great a persuader and performer as Bill until she tried to do it herself. 
 
 Bill has now given 10 convention speeches and he has had awful moments and great ones. I was there in 1988 when he talked for 33 minutes and the Dukakis delegates began cheering when he finally said “In closing…” And I was there in 2012, when he won raves for selling Barack Obama’s agenda, after the articulate-but-aloof president somehow wasn’t able to, and had to appoint Bill as “Secretary of Explaining Stuff.” This speech was slightly over 40 minutes. 
 
 Donald Trump had a soap opera actress speak at his convention but the Clintons easily topped that. Their lives have been an astonishing soap opera in which Bill has played many starring roles – the loyal spouse, the betraying spouse and the subconscious saboteur. 
 
 This was a night a long time coming for the former moot court partners, a night celebrating the promise that animates the Clinton partnership: She helped him. She moved to Arkansas for him. “I really hoped that her choosing me and rejecting my advice to pursue her own career was a decision she would never regret,” Bill said tonight. 
 
 She added the Clinton name to Rodham to please old-fashioned Southerners when Bill lost the governor’s mansion to help him win it back. Bill told the story tonight about how she engineered his comeback, noting “My experience is it’s a pretty good thing to follow her advice.” 
 
 Hillary chafed at eight years of the anachronistic role of first lady, even through slights like getting stationery with the restored middle name of Rodham missing as her husband campaigned for the White House. (She sent it back.) 
 
 “That girl” put up with the humiliations of Bill’s hound-dog ways with “that woman” and others, and let him hide behind her skirt. 
 
 And tonight Bill paid her back — and tried to extend his own legacy — even as Trump gets ready to exert more effort dragging the former president through the mud. Jeb Bush had faltered partly on dynasty fatigue, but Bill does not intend to let that happen to Hillary. 
 
 Starting tonight and through the fall as he tries to woo back white voters and older voters in the Rust Belt and the South, he is trying to conjure the halcyon days of Clinton peace and prosperity. He does not want to remind people of the shady days of Clinton avarice and deceit, or the parts of his presidency or post-presidency that haven’t aged well, like Nafta, the crime bill, deregulation of Wall Street and the Defense of Marriage Act, the Marc Rich pardon or the unseemly braiding of the Clinton Foundation with Hillary’s State Department. 
 
 Bill tried to augment Hillary’s sparse vision, talking about how she would be the right pilot for “the ride to America’s future.” “In the greatest country on earth we have always been about tomorrow,” 42 said, urging America to choose Hillary as 45. In other words: As Donald Trump tries to drag us back to the past — and to the Clintons’ past — don’t stop thinking about tomorrow. 
 
 Maureen Dowd is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.
– There was no shortage of history made on Day 2 of the Democratic National Convention: Hours after Hillary Clinton became the first female major-party nominee, Bill Clinton delivered the first convention speech from a would-be "first gentleman," offering a heartfelt account of his life with the woman he first met at Yale Law School in 1971. Four takes on the speech: Only the Clintons could give America "a former president who wants to be first man extolling the virtues of a former first lady who wants to be president," writes David Maraniss at the Washington Post. He describes the speech as a "quiet, rambling, at times touching, at times prosaic love letter, the likes of which no modern convention has ever quite seen or heard." Libby Nelson at Vox looks at Bill's decision to skip 1998 when recounting their history year by year. Referring to impeachment and the Monica Lewinsky scandal—which must have been "one of the more humiliating periods" of Hillary's life—could have seemed "jarring and graceless" on a night where she made history, writes Nelson. Bill's speech had a lot in common with Ann Romney's 2012 address, she writes, and it may have contained one allusion to 1998 after all: "You should elect her because she will never quit when the going gets tough," he said. "She will never quit on you." The speech was a "weedy rambler" by Bill Clinton standards, and it suggests he could be an "awkward surrogate" on the campaign trail, according to Glenn Thrush at Politico. The speech "did no damage—and fired up the faithful—but it was a shadow of Michelle Obama's deeply moving address to the convention the night before," he writes, adding that it raised the question of whether Bill will "ever really be comfortable ceding the spotlight to his wife." With this speech, "one of the most liked presidents was charged with humanizing one of the least liked presidential candidates," and he "poured on the estrogen," writes Maureen Dowd at the New York Times. "This was a night a long time coming for the former moot court partners, a night celebrating the promise that animates the Clinton partnership: She helped him. She moved to Arkansas for him," Dowd writes, predicting that this speech marks the start of Bill "trying to conjure the halcyon days of Clinton peace and prosperity" as he tries to win over older voters in the South and the Rust Belt.