Every line of JFK’s 1961 inaugural sets the table for “ask not what your country can do for you.” Every line of Martin Luther King’s famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial drives toward the affirmation that “I have a dream.” Here, as Churchill said of the pudding, it had no theme. For instance: 
 
 “Donald Trump says, and this is a quote, ‘I know more about ISIS than the generals do.’ … No, Donald, you don't.” And watch how she summarizes the danger he poses as a potential chief executive: “Loses his cool at the slightest provocation. … “When there are no ceilings, the sky's the limit.”… “My primary mission as president will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages right here in the United States” (this was a line borrowed from no less than ... Michael Dukakis). exactly the same things that Barack Obama promised. Just this morning, longtime aide Patti Solis Doyle, observed, “You can see her think about the words coming out of her mouth, knowing she knows, ‘I have to be careful about what I say,’ ” she says. (How’s that working out for your health care?)
– It was an instantly historic speech: Hillary Clinton stood before Democratic delegates in Philadelphia Thursday night and became the first woman to accept a major party's presidential nomination. Opinions on her convention address are split, largely along partisan lines, though all agree that it was quintessential Hillary Clinton. A roundup of reactions: This was the "most consequential speech of her campaign, and of her career," and it "seemed to contain an unspoken concession," writes Michael Barbaro at the New York Times. "Besieged by lingering doubts about her honesty, Mrs. Clinton made the case for a different kind of trust," he writes. "Not the textbook definition, but a more pragmatic faith in her judgment, experience, temperament, and priorities." It was a good, not great speech that didn't reveal a new side to the candidate, but it "was exactly who Clinton is: a worker, a nose-to-the-grindstone churner who never, ever stops," writes Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post. "This was a speech that reflected the candidate—50 feet off the ground rather than 50,000, policy details over soaring political rhetoric." "The speech can be summed up simply: What you see is what you get," according to Jeff Greenfield at Politico. "You, the voters, she seemed to say, simply have to accept me as I am in all my pedestrian earnestness—especially if the choice is between me and Donald Trump," writes Greenfield, who finds "something almost admirable" about her resistance to demands to "lift the protective curtain." Editors at the conservative National Review were, unsurprisingly, not impressed. The speech was "one part It Takes a Village and eleven parts old State of the Union speeches from Barack Obama and her husband," they write, calling Clinton out for admitting that Democrats had failed to address the concerns of working people, but not explaining "exactly how and why the Obama administration failed to do what she believes it should have done." The speech wasn't exactly poetry, notes Michelle Goldberg at Slate. It "was workmanlike, more a series of bullet points than a story," she writes. Still, "if you're a feminist, it's deeply moving to see a woman in a white suit—one of the iconic colors of the suffragettes—hug her daughter and then accept her party's nomination for president of the United States."