

Hillary Clinton and President Obama campaign together at a rally in Charlotte on July 5. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

As the Democratic National Convention unfolds in Philly this week, the scene will be dominated once again by three familiar faces. Bill, Barack and Hillary are not exactly the Three Amigos, no love lost among them at various moments, but time and circumstance have entwined their stories and legacies more tightly than ever. One valedictory address from Obama, one acceptance speech from Mrs. Clinton, and who knows what from the former president and potential first guy, who, for better or worse, often commands a political performance art category all to himself — even when instructed to stay mostly out of sight.

Add Bernie to the mix and you have an odd quartet that evokes many of the hopes and frustrations, promises and contradictions of the oldest political party in the United States. A woman, an African American, a Jewish guy and a Southern white male for a party that is becoming ever more diverse. One former president with a preternatural need for people and another soon-to-be former president who might rather be by himself. One idealistic if prickly senator who disdains compromise and speaks of revolution and another utterly pragmatic former senator who longs to cut cloakroom deals with old colleagues. Proponents of civil liberties and First Amendment rights who for different reasons share a disregard for the news media.

Not exactly the youngest foursome, with Obama the babe among them about to turn double nickels, but political survivalists all, in various ways, overcoming race, geography, ethnicity, impeachment, birtherism, congressional hearings and Republican attempts to delegitimize them year after year, along with their own human failings. And despite differences in temperament, character and ideology, they seem to be cohering at least for the moment in a fashion that their Trumped GOP counterparts have been unable to realize.

It has been nearly a quarter century since Gov. Clinton strolled down Seventh Avenue from Macy’s to Madison Square Garden to accept the Democratic nomination for president. He was not yet 46, on his way to becoming the third-youngest president in American history, his vitality earning him nicknames such as Elvis and the Big Dog. Now approaching 70, he appears as a shadow of his former self, his body zippered by open heart surgery, vegan thin and at times seeming so frail he could break, a once incomprehensible notion.

Yet this convention stands in some sense as a testament to Clintonian longevity. What he started during those summer days in New York continues decades later. The Democratic Party has occupied the White House two-thirds of the time since then, with he and Obama winning a total of four presidential elections and Hillary now in line to lengthen the run.

To comprehend the singularity of this long run from Clinton I to a possible Clinton II, consider these equivalents: It is the same distance as between FDR’s last wartime nomination, in 1944, and the turbulence of the Democratic convention during the antiwar protests of 1968 — events that both took place in Chicago yet seem worlds apart. Or to translate the Hillary continuum into first lady terms, imagine Rosalynn Carter seeking to return to the White House in the year 2000 or Michelle Obama running for president in distant 2032.

And there is yet another way to appreciate the enduring roles of Bill and Hillary on the Democratic national stage. Contrast them with Bernie, the small-d democratic socialist who became a tactically tentative capital-D Democrat for the first time in November, if only as a means to an end, and will be attending his first party convention — Mr. Sanders Goes to Philadelphia — at the tender age of 74.



Hillary Clinton attends a rally with Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) at Portsmouth High School Gymnasium in Portsmouth, N.H., on July 12. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

The Clintons as a Tolstoyan saga sprawling over 25 years; Sanders as a short story of less than a year’s vintage. And Obama in between, soon enough to literally tell his own story, penning a presidential memoir when he is out of office that might bring him the dreamiest advance in American publishing history.

The more things stay the same, the more they change, or something like that. The Clintons are still here, but times have changed, national political dynamics have changed, and what Democrats say they believe in has also changed markedly since Bill’s first run, in 1992. Social issues were to be avoided then. “If you said guns, gays and abortion in a roomful of Democrats, most of them would start looking for silver chalices to ward off evil spirits. It was frightening. It portended defeat,” recalled David Axelrod, the Chicago-based Democratic operative who, before serving as Obama’s political adviser, worked on the edges of that 1992 Clinton effort and turned down an offer to become the campaign’s communications director.

Then it was the centrist philosophy of the Democratic Leadership Conference on the rise, with Gov. Clinton in the lead. His mantra was of a third way, rejecting the trickle-down economics of the Reagan era while self-consciously separating from (if not outright divorcing) the old alliances and agendas that shaped the Democratic Party from the New Deal through the Great Society and its aftermath. It was going head to head with the GOP in search of big campaign money — whatever it took to win. It was sending signals to the white middle class by embracing welfare reform, forcing public school teachers to pass competence tests, rebuking the language of a black rapper, opposing the idea of same-sex marriage, and leaving the campaign trail and returning to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a mentally impaired death row inmate.

Most of those would be disqualifiers for the Democratic nominee today, with a party that opposes capital punishment, urges reform of a corrupt campaign finance system (that their candidates nonetheless consistently have taken advantage of), denounces police mishandling of African Americans, and ardently supports abortion rights, gun control, and full civil and legal rights for the LGBT community.

Politics, like all history, has to be considered in the context of the times. When Clinton launched his first campaign, his party had been out of the White House for 20 of the previous

24 years and had just lost three presidential elections in a row. This presented a classic case of what political scholar Norman Ornstein calls the Rule of Three. Anyone can lose one election, the rationalization goes. If you lose two, blame it on the candidate. But if you lose three, you are jolted back to reality. Time to reassess the party’s core message.

The Clintons and their daughter, Chelsea, enjoy the festivities on stage at the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 29, 1996, in Chicago's United Center. (J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)

Clinton’s reassessment in 1991 was that the only way they could win was by reclaiming some of the middle ground and centering his rhetoric on what he called the “forgotten” middle class. That message, along with the fact that he came from Arkansas and had an ability to speak to Southern white males — one of his earliest nicknames, after all, was Bubba — helped Clinton attract enough white votes in 1992 to win in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri and West Virginia, Southern and border states, many of which have been lost to the Democrats ever since he left office.

By the time Obama came along

16 years later, the national voting demographics had changed in a way that made it possible for him to again rearrange the party’s winning combination with what Axelrod and other advisers call the Obama Coalition, drawing on women, highly educated populations in cities and inner suburbs, and African Americans, Hispanics and other minorities. On a campaign level, this was enough to push Obama over the 50 percent mark in both elections, and on a policy level it allowed many Democrats to feel secure moving leftward on social and economic issues, taking them to where they are today.

For several years running, a trope among the political elite has been that the Democrats have a few superstars but not much of a bench. One of the missions in Philadelphia will be to prove otherwise. And there inevitably will be a certain end-of-an-era flavor to a convention that features the Clintons and Sanders and Obama. Sanders is so old he does not even qualify as a baby boomer. Obama barely does, on the other end, and it is possible if not probable that Hillary will be the last boomer to represent the party as its nominee. More change coming. Bill Clinton, in his final years in the White House, started to think of himself as a transitional president, reflecting his final campaign theme as a bridge to the 21st century. Hillary, all these years later, seems like yet another bridge.

But some things seem less prone to change in the near term. Even as Bernie and his ardent legions have pushed Hillary from the center on many issues, including trade and economic inequality, she seems likely to govern from the center-left as her husband and Obama did if she reaches the White House. She is by nature deliberate and cautious, and her pragmatic streak has always been at least as strong as Bill’s. That was true in Arkansas, when she recruited Dick Morris, a practitioner of the art of raw political ma­nipu­la­tion, to mastermind her husband’s comeback by triangulating and co-opting the opposition on its own issues after Bill lost his reelection bid in 1980. It was true even as far back as her modestly rebellious days at Yale Law School, when she chastised peers on an alternative law journal to “get down to earth” and stop what she called their “mental masturbation” after they wrote a paper proposing that like-minded new-left young people should migrate to a single state and effect a peaceful takeover. That state, by the way, was Bernie’s lair — Vermont.



State senator from Illinois and U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama, at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. (Lucian Perkins/The Washington Post)

It was only a dozen years ago that Obama propelled himself into the national consciousness with his 2004 keynote address in Boston. By his own standards, that was not only the first but the best speech he has delivered at a convention, as remote as the theme of a nation transcending its differences might seem today. In Charlotte four years ago, it was left to Bill Clinton to essentially save the day by making the case against the Republicans with a clarity that President Obama could not produce. The peculiarities of being a potential first man might preclude Clinton from doing that again. As competitive as he is, he cannot outshine his own wife at this point in their long and winding quest, can he?

Bernie will do his forceful gesticulating thing, conducting his verbal attack on the status quo and the forces of retrogression. A new vice-presidential nominee will make a first impression. Hillary will try to reinvent herself rhetorically as much as possible, pointing toward the future rather than the past. But it might very well be Obama — with his work almost done, with many party faithful lapsing into a wistful sentimentalism, already missing him, with the nation embroiled once again in questions of what it means to be an American and how to deal with complicated issues of race — who will find the words to connect it all, the past and the present and the future of the Democratic Party.