THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION NIGHT 4: HILLARY NAILS IT.

VOX

After two straight weeks of primetime electioneering, the 2016 party convention season has come to an end, with Hillary Clinton wrapping up the Democratic event in Philadelphia with one of the strongest speeches she’s given in her career.

Hillary Clinton has a reputation as a mediocre public speaker at best. That’s understandable when you consider whom she’s compared against. Basically anyone, when assessed alongside Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, two of the best orators in the history of American politics, will look bad.

But her nomination acceptance speech was a good reminder that when necessary, Clinton can really make a big address land. One major difference was scale. Most speeches people see her give are run-of-the-mill campaign stump speeches, which are necessarily chummier, looser, less scripted, occupying an uncomfortable medium between the close, one-on-one or small group listening sessions that Clinton thrives in and big arena-size keynotes like her convention speech.

Clinton is awkward in that middle area, for sure. She doesn’t feel as comfortable joshing around as she would with a smaller group, and it shows, and yet the type of event necessitates at least some of that, to uneven effects.

But when she just needs to give a speech to a gigantic national viewership, and not vibe and connect with 100 to 1,000 people in a high school gymnasium, she does pretty damn well.. Her 2008 address was an unqualified success, doing an even better job than Bernie Sanders did this year of burying the primary hatchet and energizing her supporters in the crowd to support Obama.

And her speech Thursday night was similarly solid. Her delivery was strong, consistent, and confident. She wove in personal anecdotes fluidly rather than conspicuously. She alluded to Sanders at crucial moments ("Bernie Sanders and I will work together to make college tuition free for the middle class and debt-free for all!") but had notes in there for Republicans scared of Trump as well ("I will be a president for Democrats, Republicans, and independents").

She had to toe a careful line between shoring up the Bernie-sympathetic base and expanding her appeal to right-of-center voters alienated from an unprecedentedly terrifying Republican nominee, and she toed it well.

And I’d be remiss not to mention the sheer emotional impact of the speech, even apart from how it was delivered. The first speech as nominee of the first woman nominated by a major party was always going to be a moment.... If Clinton somehow botched her convention speech, she’d never hear the end of it.

But she nailed it. The precise benefits of nailing it, polling-wise, remain to be seen, but it’s hard to imagine what a better closing speech than this would’ve looked like.

GREG SARGENT, WASHINGTON POST 

HOW CLINTON DISPELLED ‘TRUST’ ISSUE: With large majorities still saying Clinton is not honest or trustworthy,Michael Barbaro makes a smart point: Clinton asked Americans to trust her in a different kind of way:

Besieged by lingering doubts about her honesty, Mrs. Clinton made the case for a different kind of trust onstage in Philadelphia: not the textbook definition, but a more pragmatic faith in her judgment, experience, temperament and priorities. She asked voters to trust her instincts, reciting an old saying she learned in the Methodist Church. She asked them to trust in her compassion.

She argued her judgment and temperament are dependable, a case that is perhaps made more compelling by the nature of the alternative.