Clinton made history

5 takeaways from the night Clinton made history

Sanders graciously exits, Bill plays spouse, and the arena unites behind Hillary.

By Glenn Thrush

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., 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.

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 flashpoint 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, made his tedious, hour-long 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 or not 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 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 the 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 link-up 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 un-discussed. 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 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.”