While most analysts are now dissecting Bill Clinton’s address Tuesday night at the 2016 Democratic convention in Philadelphia, the Clinton speech that could actually prove most instructive to his wife — the Democratic candidate for President — was delivered 28 years ago, in Atlanta.
That address, by acclamation, is one of the worst major speeches in American history, so bad it nearly ended the young Arkansas governor’s promising political career. Yet how he escaped that fate holds important lessons for Hillary Clinton’s campaign as it gears up now to face an opponent well practiced in the art of political humiliation.
A rising star in the Democratic Party, Bill Clinton was given the plumb assignment in 1988 of introducing Michael Dukakis on the night he accepted the party’s presidential nomination. Before a nationally televised audience, Clinton fell flat on his face. He gave such a thoroughly bad speech, running an interminable 33 minutes, that catcalls rang out from the assemblage, followed by raucously derisive cheers when Clinton pronounced the magic words, “In conclusion….”
Years later, Sandy Berger, who was Clinton’s national security adviser in the White House, reflected back on that evening in an oral history interview with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
“I have to admit that I actually worked on the speech,” he recalled. “… There are two wildly different interpretations of what Clinton was expected to do. If you talk to the Dukakis people … they say, ‘We wanted him to give a rip-roaring “Dukakis is the greatest thing since sliced bread” speech.’ If you talk to Clinton, he says that Dukakis told him he wanted him to give a serious speech. He didn’t want it to be a tub-thumper. … The truth, I’m sure, lies somewhere in between.
“I went to the speech and I sat — I remember as if it was yesterday — in the mezzanine section, and I watched this unfold. It was like watching a car crash in slow motion. It was so painful. … At some point this thing got so unruly that they turned up the lights. … My stomach was absolutely tied in knots. I couldn’t even watch the end of it. I had to get up and start walking. It’s a basketball arena in Atlanta with a concourse that goes all around. I made about two laps of the concourse and he was still talking. He finally said, “In conclusion—” and people cheered. …
“My instinct would have been to go immediately to my hotel room, get a large bottle of Jack Daniels, drink the entire thing, crawl into bed, and hide there for about three days. He went right into the press room and took it head-on. It was a pretty bloody session.”
Several of Clinton’s close friends, recognizing what this train wreck might do to his promising career, quickly plotted out a rescue operation. The centerpiece of that effort was an appearance on the “Tonight Show,” then hosted by Johnny Carson. There Clinton played the saxophone and subjected himself to Carson’s humor, which included bringing out an hourglass when Clinton sat down on Carson’s sofa for the televised chat.
Clinton’s acknowledgment of his public pratfall completely reversed the ill effects of his terrible performance.
There were three key elements to Clinton’s recovery. The first was a rapid and innovative response. His successive appearances in the press room and on the “Tonight Show” — immediately owning mistakes (even those evidently not of his own making) — were an unorthodox way to salvage his reputation before the image of ineptitude had become permanent. Second, he used humor to disarm the problem, finding that Americans tend to forgive those who can laugh at themselves.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Clinton revealed an extraordinary degree of personal resilience, which was to become a defining characteristic of his presidency. He did not, as Berger might have had it, hide for three days.
Instead, in the face of withering public criticism, he followed what Clinton Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros later called “the Terminator model. If [others] don’t actually shoot you down in the street, carve you up in pieces, and burn the pieces, then you keep going. In other words, unless you’re so totally debilitated that you cannot take another step, your job is to get up the next morning and take that step. So whatever they say, whatever they write, whatever they do legally, if they haven’t broken your bones yet, you keep going. That’s what I believe about Bill Clinton.”
Hillary Clinton is highly unlikely to confront the kind of self-inflicted embarrassments of her husband’s convention appearance in 1988. But we can expect an abundance of externally inflicted humiliations. To survive these, she will need Terminator-grade resilience—along with considerable political dexterity.
And deep reserves of good humor.
