The Wife and the Wrestler
Hillary Clinton
Speaking at the Gateway Hotel, Clinton’s vocal chords sounded worn out, her voice was faint and she spoke in a hushed tone during several parts of the speech. Though she is never a graceful orator, when her campaign was at full strength in the fall, she at least had a tightly focused message for her stump speech. On Tuesday, she meandered for more than 45 minutes in a speech that lacked a climax, and she gave long-winded answers when she opened the floor to questions.
The first question she took was on immigration, and she was still answering it six minutes later when I had to leave to see Edwards. By contrast, Edwards seemed to be hitting his stride at a speech at Iowa State University and was much more efficient — speaking for 25 minutes, and packing about 5 or 6 questions in the next 15 minutes, before wrapping things up so he could head off to another event.
Clinton’s closing argument can be summed up in her line that, "Some people think you can get change by demanding it, others think you can get change by hoping for it — I think you get change by working hard for it every single day."
Despite her limited track record of tangible accomplishments, Clinton wants voters to believe that she has been fighting successfully for change for 35 years. She says that during the 1990s "we" turned a deficit into a surplus and noted that she and her husband "tackled" health care — something that even FDR, Harry Truman, and LBJ were afraid to touch.
"We took it on, and we weren’t successful, but I’m proud we tried," she recounted. Here she was, highlighting a colossal failure in an attempt to make an argument that she has been successful at bringing about change.
