A certain hype preceded Hillary Clinton’s speech on foreign policy on Thursday, and a careful attention to detail. Clinton spoke in San Diego, a military town, just after Memorial Day, with what appeared to be eighteen American flags behind her. The new weapon she brought was the insight that Donald Trump’s anti-élite grievances contain a constant denigration of America, and of the vast, collaborative project of making it better. “He called our military a ‘disaster,’ ” Clinton said. “He said we are, and I quote, a ‘third-world country.’ ”
Clinton recalled that Trump has been saying that “the world is laughing at us” since at least 1987, when he bought a full-page ad in the Times to say so. “Reagan was President,” Clinton pointed out, and that was a moment when, to put it lightly, the country was not failing. “He praises dictators like Vladimir Putin and picks fights with our friends, including the British Prime Minister, the mayor of London, the German Chancellor, the President of Mexico, and the Pope,” Clinton said. Trump’s ideas “are not even really ideas—just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies,” she argued, in a sharp line that was picked up on Friday morning. Clinton mentioned the strange array of plans he had prepared for ISIS—in one instance, he suggested simply handing Syria over to ISIS, and in another sending American ground troops. The liberal line during the past week has been that Clinton ought to call Trump a fraud. Her attack, when it came, ran deeper. The real, devastating charge in Clinton’s San Diego speech was that Trump does not believe in America.
This morning, the Times analysis ran under a headline suggesting that Clinton’s speech had been “light on specifics.” But the speech wasn’t about foreign policy. It was about ethics. You could measure the depth of the hit in Trump’s response. Normally so gleeful on Twitter, he sneered at her for using a teleprompter, and that was about it. Then, in a transparent effort to steal the headlines, Trump resumed his attack on the federal judge presiding over one of the lawsuits against Trump University, Gonzalo Curiel, saying that because Curiel’s parents are from Mexico he had “an absolute conflict” of interest. Curiel is an American, Indiana-born, and he spent years as a federal prosecutor in Southern California, where he was once targeted for assassination by the Arellano Felíx drug cartel, which controlled Tijuana. It is possible to insult a minority group and gain popularity with the majority, but over time the insults add up. Given how many groups Trump has denigrated, how many Americans he has implied are not really Americans at all, his election would require many simultaneous acts of mass forgetting.
That Clinton was so effective in this speech made you wonder why she has been so much less effective through the long primary campaign—why she has so rarely been like this. Yesterday, I found myself rewatching the speeches she’d been giving in California in the past week, to try to figure out why the moral clarity she found in her speech in San Diego had so long eluded her. Foreign policy is natural territory for Clinton, its substance and subtleties familiar, but it also has another helpful feature: it lets her mostly avoid the tensions within modern liberalism. She doesn’t have to talk about the nineteen-ninties.
It has been revealing to see Clinton in California, where the main political fault lines are not between conservatism and liberalism but within liberalism itself: between the vaulting meritocracy of Silicon Valley and the poverty it obscures, between middle-class progress and environmental conservation, between minority politics and expression in a place that no longer really has a majority. Obama worked to embody these tensions; Bernie Sanders uses them in combat. Clinton mostly just ignores them. This week, she was in San Jose, in Santa Clara County, the center of Silicon Valley, which last year was reported to be the national leader in average wages but also had a double-digit poverty rate. Clinton called it “a city that’s all about the future: the future of our economy, the future of our society, of how we’re all going to be stronger together.” Then she moved on to a paint-by-numbers attack on Trump.
What this gloss misses is that, in the past decade, liberals have become increasingly uncertain that we will, in fact, all be stronger together. There has been a rising conviction, too, that the Clintons did a great deal to shape places like Santa Clara County, and that the effects have not been only good. The story that Clinton tells in her speeches instead is about the abandonment of the progress made in the nineties. In Salinas, introduced by a local congressional candidate whose father was Bill Clinton’s budget director, Clinton said, as she often does, “It is a historic fact that the economy does better when we have a Democrat in the White House.” In her account, the country was “on the right track” at the end of her husband’s Administration, with twenty-three million new jobs and incomes rising “for everybody, not just people at the top.” What happened, she said, “was we got a Republican President and a Republican Administration,” who “cut taxes, took their eye off regulating the financial industry, and the mortgage bubble.” President Obama “does not get enough credit” for his fight against the Republicans, she said.
There is a clarity to this story—her audience knows when to cheer and when to boo—but, as an account of the country’s recent experience, it falls badly short. It is also misleading, in that it tends to treat live problems within liberalism like closed cases. It is telling that Clinton, attacked relentlessly by Sanders for giving paid speeches for Goldman Sachs, never really defended her view of capital’s role in the economy; she just said that the speeches didn’t matter in a Presidential election. Either Clinton really believes that her husband’s Administration resolved the basic problems of social design or, more likely, she is enough of a partisan that she will not publicly describe where it went wrong. One way or the other, she has a blind spot.
Clinton seemed much more comfortable on Thursday afternoon, in San Diego—more serious, more level in tone, more thoughtful. That up-and-up-and-up-again cadence that she uses when she’s promising the new jobs and infrastructure bound to come in her Administration was gone entirely. Clinton was said to have spent the past week carefully studying Trump’s speeches and history. In that time, she seems to have acquired an idea of her opponent and, in turn, herself: that she is the patriot in the race, and the believer.
