and at ease, not always a given for her in public appearances, and she did two things very well. First, she rendered the meaning of her role as potentially the first female president in powerful strokes — in terms of the nation’s history, in terms of concrete policies she would advance, and in terms of her own personal history. (Her mother’s hard-knock childhood is not the one you expect to hear from a politician who exudes middle-class suburbia.) Second, she stood up with scorn, wit, and no-holds-barred verbal fisticuffs to Donald Trump. The Trump section of her speech makes you long for the debates, not least because she indicated that one of her implicit goals is to provoke him into losing his cool onstage. Never in the historyof presidential politics in the age of television have there been two major-party contenders so antithetical in every way, from their worldviews to their intellects to their psyches to their rhetorical styles to, of course, their genders. What voter would not watch?

The speech also reflected just how much an impact Bernie Sanders has had since his movement caught fire. Clinton, who at her worse equivocates on tough issues or dodges them altogether, took unequivocally progressive stands on causes that Sanders advanced in the primary, and even sounded somewhat convincing railing against the one-percenters in her own donor camp. None of this is likely to win over any conservative voters, but one would hope it helps energize her party’s base. If only she had had an editor! Clinton was