Unconventional #46: Day Four — The ‘How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Hillary’ Edition

Coming to you live every morning from Philadelphia, Unconventional is the one thing you need to read to understand what’s really happening at the Democratic National Convention. Each edition will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the biggest (and weirdest) moments of the day, with original dispatches from the entire Yahoo Politics team — plus a sneak peek at what’s next.

Clinton’s former rivals to her skeptics: Get over it — we did

PHILADELPHIA — How do you solve a problem like Hillary?

With Bernie Sanders packing his bags for Burlington, and the party’s presidential nomination finally, firmly settled (even if the last few Sanders stragglers protesting in the press tent might disagree), the attention of the Democratic National Convention turned Wednesday to the unenviable task of trying to persuade the American people to vote for a nominee whom 55 percent of them don’t like and 68 percent of them don’t trust — and who is actually trailing Donald Trump in the polls right now.

Monday and Tuesday’s marquee speakers did their darnedest. Michelle Obama presented a mother-in-chief’s case for Clinton. It got rave reviews. Bill Clinton’s speech was “part grandfatherly musings, part nostalgic love story, part family history, part political memoir” — the kind of testimony that only a husband (who also happens to be the greatest political talent of his generation) could deliver.

But on Wednesday night, the DNC took it up a notch, trotting out four of the biggest names in American politics — back to back — to vouch for Clinton: former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine, Vice President Joe Biden, President Obama. And all of them, to one degree or another, had the same message for the millions of Hillary skeptics watching at home:

Get over it. We did.

“Hillary’s got her share of critics,” Obama said. “She has been caricatured by the right and by some on the left. She has been accused of everything you can imagine and some things that you cannot. But she knows that’s what happens when you’re under a microscope for 40 years.”

“That’s what happens when we try,” he continued. “That’s what happens when you’re the kind of citizen Teddy Roosevelt once described [as] someone ‘who is actually in the arena.’”

“Hillary Clinton is that woman in the arena.”

Bill Clinton was never skeptical of Hillary. He spoke at length Tuesday about falling in love with her at first sight. But most people don’t seem to feel that way. “[T]here’s just something about her that pisses people off,” Washington hostess Sally Quinn said 20 years ago. “This is the reaction that she elicits from people.”

And that was the subtext of Wednesday’s big speeches. Bloomberg, Biden, Kaine and Obama were all skeptics once — just like you. Obama called Clinton “likable enough.” In 2008, Kaine could have endorsed Clinton; he chose Obama instead. Bloomberg considered running against Hillary in 2016. So did Biden.

But none of them are skeptics anymore (at least not in public). Now they call themselves converts — and they spent Wednesday night reaching out and trying to convert others as well.

“There are times when I disagree with Hillary,” said Bloomberg. “But whatever our disagreements may be, I’ve come here to say: We must put them aside for the good of our country.”

To be sure, a big part of the argument was Trump. The attacks were relentless. Bloomberg described him as a “dangerous demagogue.” Kaine called him “a slick-talking, empty-promising, self-promoting, one-man wrecking crew.” At first, Biden claimed Trump “has no clue about what makes America great.” Then he corrected himself: “Actually he has no clue. Period.” The crowd lost it. And Obama gave a little chuckle when the subject came up.

“The Donald is not really a plans guy,” the president said, still grinning. “He’s not really a facts guy, either.”

According to them, any other candidate would look good in comparison. As Obama put it, “the choice isn’t even close.” And yet each speaker made the case, in his own way, for why he’d come around to Clinton — and why the United States should too.

As usual, Obama was the most persuasive.

“You may remember,” he began, “Hillary and I were rivals for the Democratic nomination. We battled for a year and half. Let me tell you, it was tough — because Hillary was tough. I was worn out. Every time I thought I might have had the race won, Hillary came back stronger.” Obama went off script for a moment, turning to a line he’s been using this year to acknowledge the obstacles women can face when they run for office: “She was doing everything I was doing, but just like Ginger Rogers, it was backwards in heels.”

“But after it was all over, I asked Hillary to join my team,” he continued. “She was a little surprised. Some of my staff was surprised. But ultimately she said yes — because she knew what was at stake was bigger than either of us.”

“And for four years, I had a front-row seat to her intelligence, her judgment and her discipline. I came to realize that her unbelievable work ethic wasn’t for praise. It wasn’t for attention — that she was in this for everyone who needs a champion.”

The truth, of course, is more complicated. It always is. But conversion stories are powerful things, and they were told throughout the night, either implicitly or explicitly, as a way to show that the skeptics are wrong. If the skeptics only got to know Clinton, they would realize, as Obama, Biden, Kaine and Bloomberg have, that she isn’t untrustworthy, or inconsistent, or opportunistic, or whatever.

Biden was once bitter about Clinton’s boxing him out of the 2016 race. But his words told a different story.

“Everybody knows that she’s smart,” he said. “Everybody knows that she’s tough. But I know what she’s passionate about. I know Hillary.”

Kaine once considered Hillary an inferior candidate. (He was one of the first politicians to endorse Obama in 2007, calling it a “very simple decision for me” and implying that Clinton was too divisive to earn his support.) But his words told a different story.

“Hillary Clinton and I are compañeros del alma,” Kaine said. “We share this belief: Do all the good you can and serve one another. … That’s what I’m about. That’s what you’re about. That’s what Bernie Sanders is about. That’s what Joe Biden is about. That’s what Barack and Michelle Obama are about. And that’s what Hillary Clinton is about.”

And Bloomberg was once (reportedly) “turned off by what he views as Clinton’s changing of positions for political expediency.” But his words told a different story.

“Now, I know Hillary Clinton is not flawless; no candidate is,” he said. “But she is the right choice — and the responsible choice — in this election.”

On Thursday night, Clinton herself — not the caricature — will step to the podium in the middle of Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center and deliver the most important speech of her life. The question now is whether she can prove the skeptics wrong and Wednesday’s big-name speakers right. Whether she can convert a few more people. And whether she can show, as Roosevelt put it, that “it is not the critic who counts” but rather “the man” — or woman — “who is actually in the arena.”

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Missed the speeches? We’ve got you covered.

Olivier Knox on Barack Obama: “President Obama formally passed the torch to Hillary Clinton on Wednesday — but not before using it to try to burn down Donald Trump’s hopes of the White House and to light a fire under any Democratic voters inclined to stay home in November.”

Jon Ward on Joe Biden: “It seemed like the speech Joe Biden would have given if he were the Democratic nominee for president. And clearly, the vice president felt Wednesday night he’d have been doing awfully well against the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.”

Liz Goodwin on Tim Kaine: “Sen. Tim Kaine defended Hillary Clinton against Republican attacks Wednesday night in his first speech since officially becoming the Democratic nominee for vice president. Kaine also debuted an impression of Donald Trump, mocking the Republican nominee for making promises he doesn’t keep.”

Hunter Walker on Mike Bloomberg: “Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg used his own business success to undermine the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, who has largely based his campaign on his brand as a real estate developer and dealmaker. At one point, Bloomberg even called into question Trump’s sanity.”

Andrew Romano on Jerry Brown: “Capping a session that saw seven of his state’s top elected officials addressing the Democratic National Convention, California Gov. Jerry Brown completed a decades-long transformation from one of the Clintons’ bitterest Democratic foes to one of Hillary’s most prominent, if not particularly passionate, supporters.”

Olivier Knox on Leon Panetta: “In a blistering, mocking speech Wednesday, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared Donald Trump dangerously unfit to be commander in chief, accusing the brash entrepreneur of inviting Russian spies to help him defeat Hillary Clinton. The crowd booed, many chanting, ‘No more war!’ The raucous delegates several times forced Panetta to pause.”

Jon Ward on the gun-control program: “It was a grim tableau, illustrating the depressing toll of mass shootings that have come to increasingly dominate the nation’s consciousness over the past several years. The variety of root causes driving the shooters — mental illness, racism, extremist Islamic ideology — served as a way for Democrats to say that guns were the common factor and access to them should be limited.”

Garance Franke Ruta on Ilyse Hogue: “Her remarks came in the 5 p.m. hour, not in primetime, but when NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue spoke from the Democratic National Convention stage here on Wednesday, she made convention history. On Tuesday, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards was the first speaker to utter the word abortion from the convention stage this year. The next day, Hogue broke new ground and spoke about having had one.”

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Overheard

(or seen, in this case)

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Why Clinton doesn’t inspire us

In his latest dispatch from the DNC, Yahoo News National Political Columnist Matt Bai muses, as Hillary Clinton prepares to speak Thursday night, on why her nomination isn’t more inspiring — not to “the partisans on one side or the other, those who are programmed to see Clinton as an icon or a demon, no matter what she says or does,” but rather “those of us in the broad center.”

His theory is really interesting:

I think this has to do with our own conception of what a societal trailblazer is supposed to look like.

Obama inspired even those Americans who were skeptical of his candidacy in 2008, in part because everything about him screamed, “This is the guy who changes things.” He was young and cool and eloquent, an outsider in both politics and temperament. He arrived from nowhere, unblemished.

Obama fit the mold of a barrier buster like Martin Luther King Jr. or Jackie Robinson or John Kennedy. We had little concept of who any of them were before they were pioneers, beyond the mythologies that surrounded them. It’s as if we dreamed them up to fulfill a narrative whose time had come.

That’s not Hillary Clinton. She’s not new or young; she is, near as I can tell, the oldest nominee in Democratic history. She’s neither eloquent nor rhetorically fearless. She calculates and deflects.

Far from bursting onto the stage in heroic fashion, Clinton has pretty much hung around for longer than anyone thought possible, seizing opportunities and outlasting rivals.

Ironically, since she helped investigate Watergate early in her career, the politician Clinton resembles most in her path to power is probably Richard Nixon, circa 1968.

A fundamentally insecure and untrusted politician, Nixon refused to fade away after losing the presidential race in 1960 (and the California governor’s race two years later). Eight years on, after the implosions of Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, his moment came back around.

Clinton, eight years after her own loss, will accept the nomination tonight, in part because of two disastrous midterm cycles that essentially wiped out a generation of potential adversaries.

And if Clinton is about to blow through a marker women have eyed for generations, then she is doing it in a decidedly unfeminist way. This isn’t Margaret Thatcher, who threw herself into an all-male establishment and dominated it through sheer steel and charm, accompanied all the while by a subservient husband.

If we’re honest about it, Clinton’s presence on the stage in Philadelphia owes a lot to the two presidents who spoke before her. One empowered her as his spouse in the White House, without which she could never have sought a Senate seat in a state she’d never lived in. The second rehabilitated her career after derailing it, by appointing her to a senior Cabinet post.

Her rise is inextricably linked to the successes of two successful men, in a way that probably belies our ideals — so ingrained in us as to be almost subconscious — about self-reliance and meritocracy.

Clinton is an imperfect vehicle because she’s not the cinematic version of our first woman president, like Geena Davis in “Commander in Chief.” History did not pluck her from obscurity to fulfill America’s promise; if anything, it tried to sideline her and failed.

But we don’t get to hold casting calls for the roles of our change agents, to hold out for the social pioneer whose image we project in our heads. We can’t always wait around for what Norman Mailer called the “existential hero” in our politics to come along.

Make sure to read the rest.

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Convention diary

Click through for the full convention diary from North Carolina delegate Vinod Thomas.

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The big picture

Photographer Khue Bui is on the ground in Philadelphia, capturing all of the action for Yahoo News. Here’s his most unconventional pic of the day.

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Meanwhile, in Donald Trump news…

He invited Russia to hack the U.S., as Holly Bailey reports …

In a freewheeling and unusual news conference, even for him, Donald Trump directly called on Russia to find the estimated 30,000 emails that Hillary Clinton deleted from a controversial private email server she used as secretary of state.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” the Republican presidential nominee said, staring directly into the bank of television cameras set up at a golf course he owns outside Miami. “I think you will probably be mightily rewarded by our press.”

It was a striking moment in an election that has consistently broken the barriers of political tradition. It came after Trump faced intense questioning from reporters over his relationship to Russia amid allegations that the country might be trying to influence the outcome of the presidential election on his behalf.

… did a Reddit AMA (Chris Wilson has the details)

Donald Trump kicked off his Wednesday with a long and controversial morning press conference, and he ended it this evening with an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit that served as an opportunity for his biggest fans to interact with the Republican nominee. It was also an attempt to appeal to frustrated Bernie Sanders supporters who might be interested in joining his cause.

Over the course of 90 minutes, Trump answered 13 questions — most of them in brief replies, mainly working through his greatest hits. He cited his immigration plan on his website, referenced “Crooked Hillary,” reaffirmed his love of winning, and expressed his support for the nation’s police. One user asked about what he would like to convey to disillusioned Sanders supporters or anyone else considering a third-party vote.

… and unveiled his Jon Lovitz impersonation.

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By the numbers

4,769:

The number of delegates at the Democratic National Convention

20,000:

The number of credentialed media

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The best of the rest

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What to watch Thursday

Theme: Stronger Together

Gavel in: 4:30 PM

Speakers:

Hillary Clinton

Chelsea Clinton

General John Allen

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti

Jennifer Pierotti Lim, co-founder of Republican Women for Hillary

Candidates of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committe

Chad Griffin, President of the Human Rights Campaign

Gene Karpinski, League of Conservation Voters President

Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, Co-Chair of the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus, and LGBT rights activist Sarah McBride

U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland and the Democratic Women of the Senate

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