Hillary Clinton delivers a national-security address in San Diego in June. Photograph by Justin Sullivan / Getty

Certain things have come too easily for Hillary Clinton in the general election, and her loose, fervent talk about American exceptionalism may be among them. On August 31st, Clinton spoke at the American Legion Convention, in Cincinnati, to a group of mostly older men in pointy hats for whom American exceptionalism has meant a particular roster of military engagements followed by a particular roster of charitable ones. “It’s not just that we have the greatest military, or that our economy is larger than any on Earth,” she told them. American exceptionalism is about “the strength of our values.” But what values, exactly? Clinton said that she would never insult veterans and their families, as Donald Trump has, or “abandon our allies,” as he has threatened to do—but about actual American values she was conspicuously silent. The idea of mutual respect kept recurring: in her advocacy of diplomacy, in the letters from men who had served under her father in the Navy which she said she held dear, in the pointed story she told about the Navy SEALs who, having assassinated Osama bin Laden, escorted the terrorist’s children and wives to safety. “That’s what makes us great,” she said. As definitions of national greatness go, it seemed pretty thin. Should we think that members of the British Special Forces, had they found themselves in the same compound, would have done anything differently?

Since early June, when she launched her campaign against Donald Trump with a speech to military families, in San Diego, Clinton has been running a campaign around ideas of patriotism. In that speech, Clinton, with nineteen American flags behind her, focussed on Trump’s crude and constant talk about the sorry state of the country. She pointed out his claim that the world had been “laughing at us” since the nineteen-eighties, which was, after all, a long period of American prosperity and strength. “He said we are, and I quote, ‘a third-world country,’ ” Clinton said. At the time, it would have seemed at least as credible to say that Trump believed in America too much, too narrowly and naïvely; instead, in a now characteristic attack, Clinton said that he believed in it too little. Ever since, she has been running on safe ground, speaking as though she stands in a forest of flags. “This election truly is about who has the experience and the temperament to serve as President and Commander-in-Chief,” she said in Cincinnati.

This is a dull way to talk about the Presidency, and an uninspiring way to imagine what makes this country exceptional. But it is in line with Clinton’s strategy this summer, in which she has worked to claim the conventionally Republican political territory that Trump has abandoned. Her Convention welcomed the frankly bloodthirsty anti-ISIS General John Allen and the plutocrat Michael Bloomberg; she has worked to win the endorsements of the G.O.P. fund-raiser Meg Whitman and, if the rumors are true, Henry Kissinger. She has told Republican audiences that those looking for the legacy of the “Party of Lincoln” can find it with her rather than with Trump.

There is, beneath all the bland but effective talk about patriotism, a deep moral logic to her campaign, which propels it sometimes to the left and sometimes to the center. Trump’s most infamous attacks—on President Obama’s citizenship, on the federal judge Gonzalo Curiel’s ability to rule fairly, and on the Gold Star father Khizr Khan’s commitment to secular culture—have raised suspicions of dual loyalties. These are efforts to deny immigrants, and the children of immigrants, ownership of the American tradition. Clinton, in turn, has noted the differences in experience that exist even within the most traditional institutions. In San Diego, she said, “By the way, Mr. Trump, every time you insult American Muslims or Mexican immigrants, remember that plenty of Muslims and immigrants serve and fight in our armed forces.” The most constant theme of her campaign has been the movement of outsiders to the center of American life. It is about assimilation.

Donald Trump holds his rallies at night, in sports arenas, to draw attention to the anonymous, fervent crowds. Clinton has held hers at midday, in community centers and out-of-session high schools. One afternoon in August, I drove to a basketball gym in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where Clinton and Vice-President Joe Biden were holding a joint event. Scranton conjures a particular image of the white working class, and when I first scanned the crowd I thought I saw it: people were chatty, they were dressed casually, and there were more women than men. Just in front of me was a lesbian couple who caught my eye when one tenderly brushed some sweat from the other’s upper lip. A thin, dark-skinned man in a business suit took the stage to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, but his accent was so thick that he had to concentrate to make himself understood. The crowd, sensing the symbolism, cheered loudly.

In the risers before the event, thirtysomething Clinton staffers in business suits handed out signs for audience members to raise for the cameras: “I’m with Her,” “Stronger Together.” But the handmade buttons and shirts all had the same slogan: “Love Trumps Hate.” A local campaign staffer described his feelings of alienation as a young gay man. The state’s auditor general, Eugene DePasquale, had one emotional note in his speech, when he said that his daughter, now thirteen, would graduate college in a world in which every glass ceiling had been broken. After DePasquale came a matronly, curly-haired woman named Karen Macek, a bank manager from Moosic, Pennsylvania. Macek’s eight-year-old daughter has the same disability as Serge Kovaleski, the Times reporter whom Trump mocked at a rally last November, arms flailing. Trump, Macek said, “finds it exceedingly easy to disrespect and insult people who are different.”

Sometimes Clinton seems to be talking past the diversity of her actual crowd to a more homogenous idea of it. In Scranton, she intended to explain how absurd it was that Trump had cast himself as a tribune of the working class. Trump’s daughter Ivanka had suggested, at the Republican National Convention, that her father’s Presidency would emphasize child care. Clinton observed that Trump’s resorts did not provide child care for their employees, but did enroll paying guests in a program called “Trump Kids,” which qualified them for children’s spa service. She considered who would benefit from Trump’s child-care policy, which is simply a tax deduction. “It will help rich people, who will get thirty to forty cents on the dollar to pay for their nannies,” Clinton pointed out.

Clinton grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois, an upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago, but her family had not been financially stable for very long. Her mother, abandoned by her own parents, had dropped out of school at the age of fourteen to work as a domestic, and her father had grown up in Scranton, the son of a lace-mill worker. “I always remember that I am the granddaughter of a factory worker and the daughter of a small-business owner, and I am so proud of it,” Clinton said, loudly enough that it was obviously meant as an applause line. But being the grandchild of someone who struggled is very different than being the child; the experience of suffering is already incorporated into a story about overcoming it. The personal details that Clinton offered about Scranton were about summers with her grandparents at Lake Winola; as in so many Clinton stories, the gesture at social unity was strained, but it was there. Then Clinton introduced “Scranton’s own” Joe Biden, and sat down on a chair that had been provided for her, a pillow supporting her back.

Biden, delivering a speech in Scranton, has his own stations of the cross: the loud, loving, caustic Catholic family in which he grew up; the decency, in the face of indignities, of the mid-century working class. He described the “longest walk” that his father ever took, up the stairs of his home, to explain to his family that they would have to move in with the grandparents. “Even then, he knew he would bounce back, because America always did,” Biden said. What Biden offers, as a politician, is a primitive sort of warmth. He talked about the values of Scranton, where “you’re defined by your courage and you’re redeemed by your loyalty.” Biden said, “You’re all raised in this area—different ethnicities, different religions, different backgrounds.” What he missed was the story contained within that sentence, about how the ambition and suffering of the mid-century white working class became the experience of a more diverse country. This was not a coda to his story but its essence. Clinton and Biden linked hands and walked off the stage together, two orbs of hair, pale and fluffed, standing before a panorama of their supporters in Scranton, who, upon close examination, looked little like them.