Mr. Clinton’s political history of boom and bust has made him one of the most enduring figures of modern American life, if not always its most accepted.
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Bill Clinton during the 1992 Democratic National Convention in New York. His appearance on Wednesday night will be the 12th time he has addressed the party’s quadrennial conclave.
No one will take the stage at the Democratic National Convention this week with more experience at the task of the Big Speech than former President Bill Clinton.
When he gets up on Wednesday night at Chicago’s United Center, it will be the 12th time he has addressed the party’s quadrennial conclave, a record of rhetoric that has gotten him dubbed the “secretary of explaining stuff.”
But the progression of those dozen speeches reflects the larger story of Mr. Clinton’s political life, a tale of boom and bust and boom again that has made him one of the most enduring figures of American life in the modern era, if not always its most universally accepted. He has gone from young rising star to tiresome bloviator to dynamic presidential nominee to popular incumbent to scandal-tarred lame duck to candidate husband to wise elder statesman, with quite a few ups and downs in between.
Mr. Clinton, who turned 78 on Monday, is the same age as former President Donald J. Trump and three years younger than President Biden, and to some extent a product of another era. His brand of moderate politics in the 1990s reshaped the Democratic Party from a perennial loser to the party that would go on to win the national popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.
But welfare-reforming, free-trading, budget-balancing centrism is not in vogue in today’s Democratic Party, where progressive politics are more resonant. Moreover, Mr. Clinton’s history of sexual indiscretions — and allegations of even worse, although denied — look different in light of the #MeToo movement of recent years. In that sense, his presence may appear somewhat discordant at a convention devoted to electing the first woman president.
Still, it is also a convention about generational torch-passing, and Democrats hope that Mr. Clinton’s speech will help validate Vice President Kamala Harris, 59, particularly with working-class white swing voters in Midwestern and Sun Belt states who remember the 42nd president fondly and are not yet sure whether to make her the 47th.
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