Bill Clinton Pours On the Estrogen

By Maureen Dowd

PHILADELPHIA — His life took off, he said, when he fell in love with “that girl.”

He told a familiar love story, recounted in his memoir, about springtime at Yale Law School in 1971 and a “magnetic” girl with thick blond hair and big glasses and no makeup and a long, white flowery skirt.

He said when he first saw her in a political and civil rights class that he wanted to tap her on the shoulder but he knew if he did, he would be starting something beyond his control.

With a sky-blue tie and silvery hair and an easy smile, the 69-year-old looked healthier than he has on the trail. And he was sharp.

The Big Dog basked in the unique historic moment: a former president and a husband and a wannabe first lad making the case for a former first lady, a wife and a wannabe first woman president.

In an act of amazing self-restraint, the man who relishes the word “I” managed to make the talk, as he prefers to call his folksy speeches, all about her. He was positively uxorious.

She “calls you when you’re sick, when your kid’s in trouble or when there’s a death in the family,” Bill said of his partner of 40 years.

It has been said that the essence of the Clinton marriage is coming to each other’s rescue in critical moments. Or maybe more precisely, their byzantine conjugal dynamic works like this: One of them creates chaos — usually Bill — and then they get out of it together. Or as a former aide described the Clinton pattern: “Hubris. Funk. Reintroduction.”

“You could drop her in any trouble spot, pick one, come back in a month and somehow, some way, she will have made it better,” he said, in a line that could have applied to global crises or marital. (An earlier celebrity speaker tonight was Tony Goldwyn, who plays the philandering president in a series inspired by Bill and Monica).

After the email shaming and a bloodless campaign, tonight it was Bill’s turn to rescue Hillary from being the most unknown known person in history. One of the most liked presidents was charged with humanizing one of the least liked presidential candidates.

“One of the most seductive characters we’ve seen in American politics in our lifetime,” as David Axelrod calls Bill Clinton, had to melt the sphinx-like aura of his guarded wife.

The uncontrollable Clinton had to make the tightly-controlled Clinton seem less coiled and more endearing. The Protean pol had to take his wife’s ever-shifting personas and policies, and paint a cohesive portrait. He rivaled Ivanka in his talent for airbrushing, but he probably won’t be offering his convention outfit for sale tonight.

Hill and Bill both have 100-percent name ID but Bill’s task was to reintroduce her as “the best darn change-maker I have ever met in my entire life.”

A quarter-century after Clinton aides wrote memos about how to warm up and round out Hillary by raising her profile as a mother, Bill was still trying to drive that point home.

“My daughter had the best mother in the whole world,” he said tonight, adding that Hillary was “first and foremost” a mother, “our family’s designated worrier” who only worried about Bill’s parenting when he took a couple days off with Chelsea to watch all six “Police Academy” movies “back-to-back.” He described Hillary on her knees, lining Chelsea’s Stanford dorm room drawers with paper when their daughter moved to college, until Chelsea told them it was time to leave.

It is another example of the overcorrecting that marks Hillary’s career. In trying to feminize and maternalize Hillary, Bill almost went overboard about that “girl,” as he called her three times. He poured on the estrogen, presaging his role as helpmeet in the East Wing.

He never mentioned Donald Trump, the man he used to be friendly with and play golf with. He simply alluded to the way the Republican convention had tried to turn Hillary into a “cartoon” villainess. “Life in the real world is complicated and hard,” he said, and “a lot of people think it’s boring.”

“One is real, the other is made up,” he said of the caricature of Hillary. “You nominated the real one.”

He implicitly compared his wife to her gilded rival, limning her as someone genuinely seeking a life of service. He talked about her summer sliming fish in Alaska and all her work for poor children.

Hillary has said that she never realized how hard it was to be as great a persuader and performer as Bill until she tried to do it herself.

Bill has now given 10 convention speeches and he has had awful moments and great ones. I was there in 1988 when he talked for 33 minutes and the Dukakis delegates began cheering when he finally said “In closing…” And I was there in 2012, when he won raves for selling Barack Obama’s agenda, after the articulate-but-aloof president somehow wasn’t able to, and had to appoint Bill as “Secretary of Explaining Stuff.” This speech was slightly over 40 minutes.

Donald Trump had a soap opera actress speak at his convention but the Clintons easily topped that. Their lives have been an astonishing soap opera in which Bill has played many starring roles – the loyal spouse, the betraying spouse and the subconscious saboteur.

This was a night a long time coming for the former moot court partners, a night celebrating the promise that animates the Clinton partnership: She helped him. She moved to Arkansas for him. “I really hoped that her choosing me and rejecting my advice to pursue her own career was a decision she would never regret,” Bill said tonight.

She added the Clinton name to Rodham to please old-fashioned Southerners when Bill lost the governor’s mansion to help him win it back. Bill told the story tonight about how she engineered his comeback, noting “My experience is it’s a pretty good thing to follow her advice.”

Hillary chafed at eight years of the anachronistic role of first lady, even through slights like getting stationery with the restored middle name of Rodham missing as her husband campaigned for the White House. (She sent it back.)

“That girl” put up with the humiliations of Bill’s hound-dog ways with “that woman” and others, and let him hide behind her skirt.

And tonight Bill paid her back — and tried to extend his own legacy — even as Trump gets ready to exert more effort dragging the former president through the mud. Jeb Bush had faltered partly on dynasty fatigue, but Bill does not intend to let that happen to Hillary.

Starting tonight and through the fall as he tries to woo back white voters and older voters in the Rust Belt and the South, he is trying to conjure the halcyon days of Clinton peace and prosperity. He does not want to remind people of the shady days of Clinton avarice and deceit, or the parts of his presidency or post-presidency that haven’t aged well, like Nafta, the crime bill, deregulation of Wall Street and the Defense of Marriage Act, the Marc Rich pardon or the unseemly braiding of the Clinton Foundation with Hillary’s State Department.

Bill tried to augment Hillary’s sparse vision, talking about how she would be the right pilot for “the ride to America’s future.” “In the greatest country on earth we have always been about tomorrow,” 42 said, urging America to choose Hillary as 45. In other words: As Donald Trump tries to drag us back to the past — and to the Clintons’ past — don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.

Maureen Dowd is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.