PHILADELPHIA — Bill Clinton delivered an intimate portrait of his wife Hillary Clinton in a speech to the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday that also included a pointed rebuttal to Republican efforts to demonize her.
Clinton’s task in his 42-minutes address, which sources said he was working on Tuesday, was to personalize a woman who has been a public figure in American life for more than three decades.
{mosads}He did so by spending a lot of time discussing his courtship of Hillary Rodham, even as he skipped over his years in the White House, a decision that showed he did not want the focus to be on his presidential career. That strategy also skipped over the Lewinsky scandal of his second term.
Clinton opened his remarks with a moving and humorous account of their first meeting at Yale Law School in 1971, when he first saw her in a civil rights class and they later spoke in the library after she caught him staring at her and took the bold move of introducing herself first.
He went on to describe his persistent effort to convince her to marry him, something he succeeded on with his third try — and only after he went all in and bought a house for their future life together without knowing whether she’d be on board.
Throughout his intimate account of their courtship, marriage and early years together, he interspersed anecdotes of her dedication to public service, such as her work with poor children in New Haven, Conn. that became so consuming that it required her to take an extra year to finish her law degree.
He talked about her work as a young woman to highlight the plight of disabled children who couldn’t attend school, to register Latino voters, to fight against housing segregation and to investigate the incarceration of adolescents with adults in South Carolina.
“I married my best friend,” he said. “I was still in awe after more than four years of being around her at how smart and strong and loving and caring she was.
“And I really hoped that her choosing me and rejecting my advice to pursue her own career was a decision she would never regret,” he added.
Some Democrats thought Clinton might try to explain the public anger and frustration that fueled Donald Trump’s rise to the Republican presidential nomination and hunker down on economic issues.
Instead, it was almost entirely a personal testimonial to his wife’s character, dedication and appeal.
It also was an acknowledgement and thank you to her decision to devote her life to him, putting her own political career on hold for decades.
He contrasted the portrait of what he called the “real” Hillary to what he dismissed as the caricature Republicans sketched at their recent convention, when chants of “lock her up” repeatedly echoed through the Quicken Loans Arena.
“What’s the difference in what I told you and what they said? How do you square it? You can’t. One is real, the other is made up,” he said to loud, raucous applause.
“The real one had done more positive change making before she was 30 than many public officials do in a lifetime in office,” he said.
He noted the lifelong devotion of Hillary’s friends from childhood in Illinois and early adulthood in Arkansas to underline his argument about his wife’s true nature.
Bill Clinton said the real Hillary is someone who calls when you’re sick or having other personal problem and who earned the praise of Republican colleagues while serving in the Senate from 2001 to 2009.
Stretching for more than 40 minutes, Clinton’s address was as long as the testimony he delivered on behalf of President Obama at the Democratic convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, four years ago, which drew wide praise.
John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary’s campaign, said Clinton wrote it himself and labored over several run-throughs and worked with a team “to make sure that it’s scrubbed.”
“No one can do a better job of talking about what motivates her and how she’s gotten the job done,” he said, giving reporters a brief earlier on Tuesday.