"No, I haven't." So said Gore campaign chairman William Daley, with some asperity, when asked by U.S. News Monday afternoon at 2:30 whether he had seen the draft of Bill Clinton's speech, scheduled for delivery at 10:15 p.m.. The speech, Daley said, had been finished at 4 Saturday morning and Clinton had canceled caucuses and television appearances to practice it. In other words, this last major political speech Bill Clinton would deliver as president was a typical Clinton production–lots of last-minute improvisation, a certain lack of orderly coordination, an arrival on the podium later than scheduled, additional embellishments that became more frequent as the president neared the end of his speech text. And it was, with a few exceptions, all about me.

Clinton waves to convention attendees. (Scott Goldsmith for USN&WR)

What Al Gore's strategists wanted more than anything else was a speech that made the case that Clinton-Gore policies are responsible for the extended prosperity of the 1990s and electing Al Gore and Joe Lieberman is necessary to continue it. And, in a few paragraphs, Clinton uttered words that seemed to do that. But effective politics is communicated in poetry, not prose. And the poetry of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton's evening was the poetry of the 1992 campaign. In her speech, delivered with discomfitting hesitation in her flat Midwestern accent, the first lady described movingly people the Clinton-Gore team encountered on their enthusiastically received joint bus tour: "the faces of despair–fathers out of work, mothers trapped on welfare, children with unmet medical needs." The Bill Clinton movie, well edited with great montage, was most vivid when it showed scenes from the 1992 Clinton campaign train. And Clinton's speech was most animated when it focused on the spirit of 1992.

The problem is that the spirit of 1992 seems to be far more important to the Clintons than it is to the voters. The Clintons talked of how America was in misery in 1992, in the same tones Democratic orators used to describe the 1930s in conventions 20 years later. But in fact the recession of 1990-91 lasted only two quarters and was over by 1992. For the other 16 1/2 of the last 17 years, the American economy has had low-inflation economic growth. In the 1992 election there was a contrast between the two active young men on the Democratic ticket and a seemingly tired, out-of-ideas 68-year-old Republican president. But that contrast is only a dim memory to most voters this year. The Clintons' poetry is intended to bring that moment back. But even if it does, it helps Al Gore only marginally against George W. Bush.

Much of the Clinton speech was a laundry list of programs and initiatives–the sort of "little things" that helped him win re-election in 1996. Political consultants tell their clients to emphasize just two or three issues when they want those specific issues to be remembered; they tell them to mention many issues when they don't want particular issues emphasized but want to convey an image of energy and activity. But such images are personal and don't transfer automatically to heirs apparent. Al Gore's strengths are more on the order of hard work and intensity. Clinton's few paragraphs testifying to Gore's character and ability were well phrased and probably effective, but there was no connection between them and the Clintonian energy that was the message of most of the speech. After one night of a four-night convention, Al Gore still has to define himself in ways that will make him competitive with George W. Bush.

Toward the end of his speech, Clinton talked about the dangers that might loom if people made the wrong choices. But his comparison was a strange one. He dwelled on 1964, the year he graduated from high school, when "I assumed, like most Americans, that our economy was on automatic–nothing could derail it." Then came the disasters of urban riots, assassinations of major figures, the Vietnam War. The problem is that these disasters came after voters returned the same party, the Democratic Party, to office in 1964. They show not the dangers an untested opposition could make if voters put it in after the other party had great successes, but the dangers a party in power, and his own party at that, could make. If it is an argument for voting for anyone, it is an argument for voting for the candidate Hillary Rodham, as she then was, backed in 1964, Barry Goldwater. It was not much of an argument for Al Gore.