Charles Blow: An ode to Bill Clinton

My political awakening came when I was a 21-year-old intern at the New York Times. It was the summer of 1992, and I was assisting the Times’ political staff at the Democratic National Convention in Madison Square Garden, in Manhattan.

I was running errands in our work space, which was backstage, when Bill Clinton emerged to accept the nomination. I thought, “There’s no way I’m missing this.”

I felt personally connected to Clinton. He was from Arkansas, where I had lived the first years of my life and where my grandmother still lived. I had grown up hearing my grandmother say that Clinton used to spend time with the family of one of her friends, and she always noted, with some amazement and amusement, that he loved hot-water cornbread.

But it was more than that. Clinton represented a slice of the South that I had always known and always aspired to: the whip-smart country boys, not intimidated by the fast-talkers, who spoke in poetry and parables, who could use the mundane aspects of the rural life as a window to all the complexity of humanity.

I ran around Madison Square Garden searching for an open door so that I could hear him. In retrospect, the security was scant compared with today. I could hear him speaking, his voice booming with an accent so familiar that it felt like home, but it wasn’t until I reached the top floor that I found an open door. I entered just as the balloons began to fall and the crowd roared and danced.

For better or worse, my sense of politics was heavily affected by him, and his ups and downs guided the evolution of that understanding.

Bill Clinton was politics to me.

So on Wednesday night, when I watched him address the crowd at the Democratic convention in Chicago, from the top row of the arena much like the one where I had first seen him, I was seized by nostalgia, and I was saddened by the image of it.

We have both aged since that night 32 years ago, obviously. But the frail man on the podium Wednesday was a shadow of the young, energetic politician who embodied politics for me.

Clintonian politics are literally aging out of impact and relevance. There are new elders, slightly younger and spryer. There are new people who can be sought out to explain and explicate.

And yet I still found myself cheering for Clinton, watching for those moments when a glimmer of the bygone Bill flashed.

When he said of Donald Trump, “Don’t count the lies, count the I’s,” I thought, “There he is!”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.