JOHN BRUMMETT: The challenge for Hillary

Hillary Clinton's challenge of a lifetime tonight is more daunting than Michelle Obama's in Hillary's behalf Monday evening.

Hillary must be tougher than Michelle, but as compassionate. She must be more specific than Michelle, but as conceptual and lofty. She must make a case for herself rather than someone else, but show as much humility and discretion.

That is all.


If Hillary could perform only half as well, or maybe 60 percent as well, then she likely would open a post-convention polling lead that Donald Trump would find insurmountable.

That's unless Michelle has opened that lead for her already, repaying in full the favor Bill did for Barack at the Democratic National Convention four years ago.

Here's an analysis of the first lady's powerful and brief address to the convention Monday night, and of the generally acknowledged utter brilliance of it:

1.) Class--Trump was thoroughly savaged personally by remarks that never stooped to recognize or utter his name. The first lady merely described a behavior. If you found that behavior boorish, or that of a man-child, that was your judgment.

If you recognized the behavior as that of Trump, and recoiled from it, that was your call.

2.) Images--Beautiful black girls playing with their dogs on the lawn of a White House built by slaves; those girls, eight years before, pressing their faces against the window of the armed SUV taking them to new schools as Mom wondered "what have we done?" to those precious youngsters for their vital formative years.

3.) Theme--Just that, meaning our shared imperative to keep children safe and make their lives better. In that, the job of a president and first lady is the same as that of all parents, indeed all responsible people. It is to fight hard to meet that imperative amid unspeakable evil beyond our control.

If you couldn't stop the Orlando slaughter, and you couldn't, then you could line up to donate blood, as hundreds did, mainly because they knew it could have been their children in that club.

4.) Context--Obama made all of the aforementioned about Hillary. I thought of what Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence had said days before--"You can't fake good kids"--when Michelle said Hillary had raised the perfect child.

And Obama said Hillary has never quit on her devotion to public service--on the imperative of making life safe and better for everybody's kids--though the years of attacks on her decency and honor and looks and hair and laugh would have driven a lesser mortal to a fully understandable retreat and cowering submission.

5.) Optimism--Make America great again? It's pretty great now. Just look at those girls playing on the lawn of the house built by slaves--indeed, upon the family for whom America has opened its official residence for nearly eight years.

America has never been perfect at any point. But it has steadily evolved from imperfection, and it has never gone back.

Now it's Hillary's turn to execute the nearest increment of Michelle's performance that is available to her by aptitude and circumstance.

Will she display the class necessary to contrast herself vitally with Trump without appearing angry or mean or unappealing?

Will she favor listeners with vivid images from her experience that reveal her humanity? Can she fight her way out of that zone of privacy that causes people to distrust her?

Will she develop a clear and appropriate theme--that we're all in this together for the safety and betterment of the children, and that we can ill-afford to become polarized in disdain, even hate, for each other?

Will she explain with the right touch that one way to keep our kids safe and make their lives better is to keep them away from certain profane and name-calling contemporary political behavior?

Will she establish the right context, which is that this presidential race is not about returning America to a place it was, but joining it arm-in-arm through leadership to keep up the steady historic march always in pursuit of a better place?

Will she make an optimistic case that, with her as president, things are going to be all right; that with the other guy, whose name she needn't call, things might not be all right at all?

It comes down to one question: Will one former first lady have blazed an oratorical trail for another, or fatally upstaged her?

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 07/28/2016

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