Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

As Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, “You go with the nominee you have, not with the nominee you might want.” Based on the speech she delivered Thursday night—the biggest of her life—Hillary Clinton and her campaign have decided that she will win or lose based on the strengths and weaknesses that have characterized her for decades. You, the voters, she seemed to say, simply have to accept me as I am in all my pedestrian earnestness—especially if the choice is between me and Donald Trump.

The question leading up to Clinton’s acceptance speech was straightforward: Would she cast off the language of an army of pollsters, consultants, and focus-group research? Would she boldly take ownership of the distrust with which two-thirds of Americans now view her? Find a theme to connect the raft of (often admirable) policy proposals that provide her answers to a country whose confidence in the future has been seriously eroded?


The answer was no. After four nights of increasingly effective stagecraft—after a night punctuated by powerful assaults on her opponent (will anyone forget the father of a slain Muslim soldier offering a copy of the Constitution to Donald Trump?)—Clinton came out with a speech that read as if it took a village of writers, consultants, and pollsters to hammer out lines that were overwhelmingly too clever by half.

Here were the highlights: “A country where the economy works for everyone, not just those at the top” (a line I heard three different Clinton operatives offer word for word at panels and briefings before the speech). … “When there are no ceilings, the sky's the limit.”… “My primary mission as president will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages right here in the United States” (this was a line borrowed from no less than ... Michael Dukakis). In its rhetoric, it was a model of what not to do in so consequential a speech.

Above all else, a speech must contain a central theme, one that provides a frame of reference for the message. Every line of JFK’s 1961 inaugural sets the table for “ask not what your country can do for you.” Every line of Martin Luther King’s famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial drives toward the affirmation that “I have a dream.” Here, as Churchill said of the pudding, it had no theme.

And by the end, Clinton’s acceptance speech was a cacophony of cliché on cliché: Yes, America's destiny is ours to choose. So let's be stronger together. … “Looking to the future with courage and confidence. Building a better tomorrow.”

For all of that, there were telling moments, effective moments that—not coincidentally—abandoned flowery words for sharper, clear declarations, particularly in her takedown of Donald Trump. For instance:

“Donald Trump says, and this is a quote, ‘I know more about ISIS than the generals do.’ … No, Donald, you don't.” And watch how she summarizes the danger he poses as a potential chief executive: “Loses his cool at the slightest provocation. When he's gotten a tough question from a reporter. When he's challenged in a debate. When he sees a protester at a rally. Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”

Indeed, one of her best hits on Trump came from Jacqueline Kennedy, reflecting on her husband’s performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis. "She said that what worried President Kennedy during that very dangerous time was that a war might be started—not by big men with self-control and restraint, but by little men—the ones moved by fear and pride." Again, note the simplicity, the clarity of the words.

Why are those words so effective? No straining effort to sound poetic. No slicing extruded politic-speak into anodyne paragraphs. Just a simple series of clear, simple assertions.

She was also wise to address those who don’t come to her side naturally, as when she said: “College is crucial, but a four-year degree should not be the only path to a good job. We're going to help more people learn a skill or practice a trade and make a good living doing it.”

Fundamentally, however, the speech can be summed up simply: What you see is what you get. She still is the public official with as good a grasp of public policy as any seeking the office, possibly including her husband. She still is the public figure who does not trust herself to speak a word without parsing every syllable. Just this morning, longtime aide Patti Solis Doyle, observed, “You can see her think about the words coming out of her mouth, knowing she knows, ‘I have to be careful about what I say,’ ” she says. That’s exactly what we saw tonight.

There is, in a sense, something almost admirable about Clinton’s resistance to the demands of friends and foes that she lift the protective curtain and show us the woman in full. Take it or leave it, she told us, in effect. The presidency may well come down to how the voters answer that challenge.