Democrats overlook the Clintons’ ‘problematic’ past at Chicago convention

CHICAGO — The Obamas are not the only Democratic power couple being spotlighted at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Despite the Clintons’ complicated political and personal histories, the pair are refinding their footing and stepping up as Democratic Party elders.

Eight years after ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s surprise loss to former President Donald Trump, she delivered an impassioned convention speech on Monday predicting that Vice President Kamala Harris would be the woman who shatters the proverbial glass ceiling that she could not. Former President Bill Clinton, whose administration was marred by the Monica Lewinsky scandal before the Me Too movement of 2017, will have a prime-time speaking spot on Wednesday.

Party officials and lawmakers defended the decision to showcase them during this week’s convention despite mixed emotions from Democrats and staunch criticism from Republicans.

Justin Pearson, who rose to national prominence in 2023 after being expelled from and later reinstated to the Tennessee state legislature over his anti-gun violence protests, welcomed the Clintons’ presence in Chicago.

“The momentum that’s being built in the Democratic Party right now can’t be stopped,” Pearson told the Washington Examiner Wednesday outside state delegation breakfasts at a downtown hotel. “I also believe that we have to have the wisdom of the elders and young people’s energy. I think we need to have a combination of folks who have helped to build this party over time, and also people who are rising and growing and learning now.”

“It’s going to be an intergenerational, multicultural, multiethnic movement of people, of leaders who have been around for a while and leaders who have not,” he said. “That’s going to get us to build the nation that we need. And so, that’s what I think [Harris is] doing.”

Angela Alsobrooks, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Maryland and a close ally of Harris, similarly disputed the idea that the Clintons’ presence could exacerbate rifts among Democrats as protests over the Israel–Hamas war in Gaza disrupt convention proceedings all week.

“Our party is unified. We are unified around an agenda, and that agenda for our country is one where we are preserving our freedoms and building an economy for every family, and we are working together, all of us, to that end,” Alsobrooks said in an interview after her appearance at the Virginia delegation breakfast. “We need every single member of our party to be working on behalf of our country, and that’s what we’re doing right now.”

Alsobrooks argued that Harris’s appeal and energy are not only “resonating” with Democrats but also “a number of independents and some Republicans” who are “ready to turn the page away from the division and the anger and the hatred that we’ve seen from this other party, led by Donald Trump.”

With Harris’s catch-cry quickly becoming “We’re not going back,” Kevin Tolbert, the Democratic Party chairman for Michigan‘s 12th Congressional District, asserted that his party should not debate the “issues” the Clintons “got wrong or anything else” and instead underscore the “things” they “got right.”

Among the criticisms of Hillary Clinton was her decision not to visit Wisconsin, one of three blue wall states that handed the 2016 election to Trump. Harris underscored that her party would not make the same mistake on Tuesday when she left the convention to rally in Milwaukee.

“We’re all human. I’m trying to find somebody that gets everything right, and nobody does,” Tolbert told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday after the Michigan delegation breakfast. “For the people who grew up watching Bill Clinton play the saxophone on the Arsenio Show, they’re thrilled to see Bill Clinton again. For maybe the younger people, they don’t know the good that Bill Clinton has done. They don’t know what Hillary has done. So, it’s our job to point that out and say, ‘This is the good they did, this is how we can build upon it, and learn from it.’”

Michigan delegate Nicole Wells Stallworth, 47, admitted she cried during Hillary Clinton’s address on Monday, though the most notable moment of the former secretary’s speech was her response to chants of “Lock him up!” Clinton smiled amid the chants, a play on the “Lock her up!” shouts that Trump encouraged during the 2016 election.

“All the things that she talked about in her 2016 campaign ended up becoming our reality in 2016 when, you know, 45 was elected,” Stallworth, a Farmington Hills sexual and reproductive healthcare advocate, told the Washington Examiner. “So [Monday] night was almost like a full circle moment. She came across as someone who was very gracious in passing the torch to Kamala.”

The ties between Harris and the Clintons run deeper than just the convention. The vice president’s chief of staff, Lorraine Voles, was a communications aide for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 White House campaign, and her stable of senior advisers has included a number of Clinton world alums during the past four years, such as former chief of staff Tina Flournoy and one-time communications director Jamal Simmons.

CNN’s S.E. Cupp made headlines on Monday for criticizing the Democratic National Committee and the convention’s organizing committee for incorporating Bill Clinton on their speaker list, claiming that his past controversies could stop the momentum Harris has generated since being promoted on the party’s ticket last month. The former president’s Wednesday night speech will be his 12th consecutive address to a Democratic convention, and in 1996, the last time the convention was held in Chicago, Clinton accepted the nomination for reelection.

“For a Democratic Party looking to the future, this man has not been president for more than two decades, and when he was he did things that Democrats would now revile,” Cupp said this week, specifically highlighting his affair with former White House intern Lewinsky and sexual misconduct allegations dating back to his days as governor of Arkansas. 

“But it’s worse than that. It’s worse. Bill Clinton’s problematic,” she added. “Listen, Democrats: You can quit Bill Clinton. That’s allowed. You’re allowed to quit him. Isn’t it time to leave him behind?”