The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

That Still Small Voice ...

After three days of coughing and spitting and quite literally losing her voice everywhere, Hillary Clinton’s speech tonight sidestepped the odd, preteen claim she recently made about having "found her voice" someplace along the campaign trail. Instead she finally paid homage to the other voices she’s been hearing there and in chaneling those voices she came as close as she comes to looking comfortable in her own skin. The speech worked so well because it reached beyond All Things Clinton, and honored “your voice, your values, your dreams.” 

This is the rhetorical flourish we’ve come to associate with Barack Obama—that all this is bigger than the candidates. Clinton’s finally figured out that voters are less moved by incantations of “yes she can,” than “yes we can.” And so she deftly honored the working women and the feminist pioneers and the children for whom she was meant to be speaking all along.

She distilled everything shrill and entitled in that wretched Robin Morgan essay into this pitch-perfect formulation: Clinton simply thanked her mother, “born before women could vote, who is watching her daughter on this stage tonight.”

There was a plea to end the war, to guarantee health insurance and to promote stem-cell research, and a promise that she won’t let anyone “swiftboat this country.” There was yet another pledge to hear our voices—not hers, ours. And then a lingering image of another tough New York broad who’s heard it all, but said very little—the State of Liberty, who just wants to be given some tired huddled folks to shelter.

A nice speech, stem to stern, illuminating that sometimes "finding your voice" just requires getting out of its way.