For every candidate, that tends to boil down to because I want to be president, but they have to find some way to sheath that in selflessness. For Clinton, one answer is experience and technocratic competence, a message that is not especially inspiring. It’s also undermined by questions about her management of the State Department, raised by her email scandal.

But Clinton received a gift in the candidacy of Donald Trump, which gave her a new motivating force: stopping Trump. Her standing has reached its highest points when Trump looks worst—for example, when, after a Democratic National Convention focused on criticizing him, he chose to play into her hands by picking a fight with Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan.

Lately, however, he hasn’t been as potent a helper. It’s tough to say quite why that is. Her own illness and email questions have helped distract attention from Trump. He has managed to avoid a Khan-level gaffe, though he hasn’t stopped saying outlandish things. (On Thursday, Trump refused to say whether he believed Barack Obama was born in the United States.) Maybe the press and the electorate have been somewhat desensitized by months of Trump. Whatever the reason or reasons, Palmieri’s statement seemed to point to the need for a fresh, affirmative case for a Clinton presidency.

There was no sweeping new message on display in Greensboro, though there were several thrusts —perhaps fitting for a candidate who, while quipping that “When it comes to public service, I’m better at the service part than the public part,” humblebragged that she had 38 separate policies laid out on her website.

Speaking to an audience of more than 1,400—hundreds more didn’t make it inside before she kicked off her speech, a few minutes early—Clinton sought to connect her own illness with the struggles of everyday Americans.

“When I’m under the weather I can afford to take a few days off. Millions of Americans can’t. They either go to work sick or they lose a paycheck,” she said. “Life events like these are catastrophic for some families, but mere bumps in the road for others …. That right there, that’s why I got into this race.”

Clinton also spoke at length about young people, broadly defined. She noted that she began her career focused on children’s legal rights and situated her fight for the 1997 Children’s Health Insurance Program in that history. In her current platform, she pointed to her proposal for debt-free college education and her concerns about national security and climate change as youth-oriented. There’s likely some strategy behind this. Clinton is facing worrying numbers among younger voters, and she’s enlisting Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to take to the trail in her support in the coming days, in a bid to win them over.

For the most part, Clinton avoided discussing Trump, except obliquely. “I have this old-fashioned notion that if you’re running for president, you should say what you’re going to do, how you’re going to get it done, and how you’re going to pay for it,” she said. She also portrayed Trump as a loose cannon unfit to command the troops, and gently mocked his appearance on Dr. Oz’s television show.