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 PHILADELPHIA—On June 15, Politico ran a story about Hillary Clinton’s bureaucratic speechwriting process. It describes how she gets input from a handful of staffers, various consultants, and her husband. She tweaks it herself, usually to make it more prosaic. “Clinton is known for taking a draft of a speech and changing it some indelible way to make it more literal and less readable,” the piece said. Created in this fashion, the speeches are comprehensive but lack poetry, a sustained argument, or a narrative arc. 
 
 Michelle Goldberg Michelle Goldberg is a columnist for Slate and the author, most recently, of The Goddess Pose. 
 
 Anyone who expected her to transcend this clunky method was probably disappointed on Thursday night. Her speech was workmanlike, more a series of bullet points than a story. She seemed loosest when she was making fun of Donald Trump: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man you can trust with nuclear weapons.” 
 
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 On Twitter, people complained about her voice. Wrote Steve Clemons, an editor at the Atlantic: 
 
 Instead of lecturing 2 citizens @HillaryClinton needs 2 have conversation w/us. Modulate voice. Tell stories. Set hopes. Smile #DNCinPHL — Steve Clemons (@SCClemons) July 29, 2016 
 
 Tweeted Bloomberg View's Megan McArdle: 
 
 It may be sexist that Clinton’s voice sounds hectoring when it gets loud. It’s also a fact. & that fact will matter https://t.co/dwanmRqFVM — (((Megan McArdle))) (@asymmetricinfo) July 29, 2016 
 
 Both were quickly attacked, but my guess is that a lot of people felt the same way. If you’re a feminist, it’s deeply moving to see a woman in a white suit—one of the iconic colors of the suffragettes—hug her daughter and then accept her party’s nomination for president of the United States. Nevertheless, Clinton is never going to be a great orator. She’s certainly not an entertainer. She clearly prefers listening to others to talking about herself. As she said, “The truth is through all these years of public service, the service part has always come easier than the public part.” ||||| 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? 
 
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 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. 
 
 Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author. ||||| In the hours before their candidate’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton’s aides said that she would take the occasion to “reintroduce herself” to the American people. Again. Mrs. Clinton has been a fixture — an inescapable one — in American politics for a quarter of a century. She’s had more new-and-improved versions than a brand of laundry detergent. She lamented that “there is no other Donald Trump” other than the one with whom we are familiar. There is no other Hillary Rodham Clinton, either. 
 
 But if you need a reintroduction to Mrs. Clinton, we will oblige: She is an opportunist without anything resembling a conviction with the exception of her unwavering commitment to abortion, a “public servant” who along with her husband grew vastly wealthy exploiting her political connections and renting access to everybody from Goldman Sachs to Vladimir Putin, a petty, grasping, vindictive, meretricious time-server whose incompetence and dishonesty have been proved everywhere from Little Rock to Benghazi. 
 
 Dressed symbolically all in white (as though she were a bride or a monarch enjoying her privilège du blanc), she delivered a speech that was one part It Takes a Village and eleven parts old State of the Union speeches from Barack Obama and her husband. Her presentation was her usual hectoring — she is not capable of speaking in another mode — and one of her themes was the superiority of collective action to atomistic individualism, as though she were running against Ayn Rand rather than Donald Trump. She decried “mean rhetoric” and then said that people who operate their businesses in ways that displease her are unpatriotic. She suggested that pillaging high-earning individuals and companies with confiscatory taxes could fund an endless goody bag of patronage for her constituents. 
 
 I.e., the usual Hillary. 
 
 “My primary mission as president will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages right here in the U.S.,” she said. That is of course unobjectionable, as indeed was much of what she said — that’s how platitudes work. But five minutes’ worth of serious thinking is enough to bring into question whether Mrs. Clinton is even serious about her most vanilla banalities. There is no serious person — Republican or Democrat — who believes that the Obama administration and its policies have produced the level of “good jobs with rising wages right here in the U.S.” that Mrs. Clinton promises. Even she doesn’t believe that, and said as much in her incoherent way: Democrats have failed to address the concerns of “working people” (surely most of us are working people), she avowed, but Barack Obama still doesn’t get enough credit in spite of this failure, and she’ll do better by doing . . . exactly the same things that Barack Obama promised. 
 
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 It isn’t that we expected Hillary Rodham Clinton to trash President Obama as he passed the Democrats’ baton to her. But if her platform is to be more of the same, then she should say as much. If her aim is to be a “change maker,” as her husband called her, then she owes the voters an explanation of exactly how and why the Obama administration failed to do what she believes it should have done. Blaming congressional Republicans for having different views and nonconforming policy preferences will not do. 
 
 Hillary was mostly maddeningly vague. 
 
 She was, of course, mostly maddeningly vague. To the extent that she ventured down from the lofty heights of moral preening and celebrating herself as a semi-divine agent of History, she mostly cleaved to her familiar list of free stuff and a proposal for punitive tax hikes on unpopular individuals, companies, and industries. Maybe there are some rubes out there who think that this will result in tuition-free college for “the middle class,” as though shifting around costs made things less expensive. (How’s that working out for your health care?) Her strategy on the Islamic State? Same thing we’ve been doing, but with an added “We will prevail!” 
 
 Well. 
 
 While we do lament the implicit lack of self-respect and individual responsibility underpinning the philosophy of president-as-Santa-Claus, the economic and cultural anxieties of the American public are not the products of political hypochondria. And neither are the national-security concerns that should be weighing heavily in American minds as the Islamic State demonstrates that its reach goes from Syria to France to Orlando and beyond. There is an alarming deficit of genuine leadership in the United States — and on the world stage — and the fact that some people have fond memories of the years in which Mrs. Clinton’s husband was occupying the Oval Office and bothering the interns isn’t much of an argument for investing her with the most powerful political portfolio on Earth. 
 
 Her most persuasive argument was that she isn’t Donald Trump. His most persuasive argument is the converse, and nothing Mrs. Clinton said on Thursday evening changes that.
– It was an instantly historic speech: Hillary Clinton stood before Democratic delegates in Philadelphia Thursday night and became the first woman to accept a major party's presidential nomination. Opinions on her convention address are split, largely along partisan lines, though all agree that it was quintessential Hillary Clinton. A roundup of reactions: This was the "most consequential speech of her campaign, and of her career," and it "seemed to contain an unspoken concession," writes Michael Barbaro at the New York Times. "Besieged by lingering doubts about her honesty, Mrs. Clinton made the case for a different kind of trust," he writes. "Not the textbook definition, but a more pragmatic faith in her judgment, experience, temperament, and priorities." It was a good, not great speech that didn't reveal a new side to the candidate, but it "was exactly who Clinton is: a worker, a nose-to-the-grindstone churner who never, ever stops," writes Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post. "This was a speech that reflected the candidate—50 feet off the ground rather than 50,000, policy details over soaring political rhetoric." "The speech can be summed up simply: What you see is what you get," according to Jeff Greenfield at Politico. "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," writes Greenfield, who finds "something almost admirable" about her resistance to demands to "lift the protective curtain." Editors at the conservative National Review were, unsurprisingly, not impressed. The speech was "one part It Takes a Village and eleven parts old State of the Union speeches from Barack Obama and her husband," they write, calling Clinton out for admitting that Democrats had failed to address the concerns of working people, but not explaining "exactly how and why the Obama administration failed to do what she believes it should have done." The speech wasn't exactly poetry, notes Michelle Goldberg at Slate. It "was workmanlike, more a series of bullet points than a story," she writes. Still, "if you're a feminist, it's deeply moving to see a woman in a white suit—one of the iconic colors of the suffragettes—hug her daughter and then accept her party's nomination for president of the United States."