Hillary Clinton Says Her DNC 2024 Speech “Was Cathartic”: Exclusive

Of all the electrifying speeches at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, Hillary Clinton’s was perhaps the most unexpected. At an event that would include Michelle and Barack Obama, Doug Emhoff, and Lil Jon, the prospect of Clinton—before her speech, anyway—evoked the specter of 2016—something to forget, something too painful to revisit in this high-water moment of good vibes. For the past nearly eight years, Clinton has been a kind of walking, talking reminder of not just her own loss to Donald Trump, but of everything the country lost to him, her every word freighted with that sense of loss and the fear and unhappiness that followed. But from her opening lines, her words had a special power. “Something is happening in America—you can feel it,” she said. “Something we’ve worked for and dreamed of for a long time.”

“It certainly is a speech that I felt I needed to give, and only I could have given,” Clinton, whom I spoke to this morning, tells me.

From the start, Clinton appeared more relaxed than many people had seen her before. Gone were the headwinds of previous Clinton eras, the melodrama of an embattled Bill and Hill against the world. Now in semi-retirement, Secretary Clinton could speak her mind without fear of attack—and tap into her emotions more frankly than ever before. “There still is this sense of 2016 being unresolved,” she says, “and that’s one of the common themes I hear. It certainly is what people tell me.”

The first sign of that shared feeling was the crowd response at the United Center, a cathartic roar that lasted a full minute. Though the room was huge, it felt intimate for Clinton, who saw friendly faces in the rows before her.

“The way that the stage went out so close to the first row of delegates, I could literally see their faces, and see the faces of people going back 120 rows,” Clinton recalls. “I didn’t feel like I was up on a stage apart from the crowd, but that I was really right in the midst of the crowd. And so it was a really emotional sense of embrace that I felt from the moment that I walked out there.”

“Overall,” she adds, “it was even more emotional than I thought.”

Clinton worked on the speech for two weeks, collaborating primarily with speechwriter Dan Schwerin, along with aides and writers Nick Merrill, Caty Gordon, and Lauren Peterson, an assigned DNC writer. Her first reader, of course, was Bill Clinton. “Originally, it was going to be Joe Biden’s convention,” Clinton says, but the mission had changed: “How would I feel when another woman would be hopefully on the brink of getting into the Oval Office?” she says. “And I felt really good.”

Clinton’s mandate was to pass a torch to Kamala Harris, to place her in the arc of history and the women’s rights movement, from the runs of Shirley Chisholm and Geraldine Ferraro to that of Clinton herself. On the day of the speech, says Schwerin, Clinton “was sitting around a table where she was reading and editing and practicing and putting her stamp on it, because it was, in the end, a deeply personal speech, her life’s work.”

This invariably made it, at least in part, about the dashed hopes of 2016, when Clinton had been holding the torch and women and girls across America had expected to wake to news of the first female president of the United States the morning after Election Night. “When I was working on the speech and practicing the speech, I got emotional numerous times,” Clinton says, “and had to kind of work through it so that I could get through it up onstage.”

“It certainly was cathartic for me,” she continues, “and based on both the reception I got in the hall and the follow-on outreach that I’ve gotten, it was cathartic for many, many people.”

Afterward, she says, people told her they had to “force themselves to watch it,” because of how painful the memory of 2016 was, but then found it “therapeutic” to hear her not just revive the feminist storyline of her own campaign but reinvent it for Harris, envisioning her taking the oath through the nearly 66 million cracks in the proverbial glass ceiling that Clinton herself had put there.

“I mean, I have just been swamped by people—both online, on text, on email, in person—really expressing how what I said made them feel in the moment, made them feel about all of their unresolved emotions around 2016,” she says. “So it was a collective experience, and that made me feel like I had done what I came to do—that, you know, don’t be afraid. Don’t be in a crouch. Do everything you can to try to elect Kamala because it’s the right thing to do, it’s the best thing to do, and it’s what our country needs right now.”

Clinton was uniquely suited to telegraph to voters the “urgency” of the moment and to give them “permission to be 100% invested” without worrying whether they were going to get fooled again. “Don’t be afraid,” she says of her message. “You know, a lot of weird things happened in 2016—we have to be prepared. We have to be smarter, quicker.”

Clinton put a few rhetorical daggers into Trump, most notably her line about Trump falling asleep at his own trial and waking up to find he’d “made his own kind of history” as a convicted felon. But the line that best crystallized the feeling inside the room in Chicago led to giddy cheers. That line was: “We have him on the run now.” It was a line Democrats wanted and needed to hear—especially from Hillary Clinton.

“I think Democrats have been kind of in a crouch,” Clinton tells me, “with our hands over our head, not wanting to get hit again by, you know, the chaos, the corruption that Trump brings in his wake, the overwhelming attention that he demands from the press, which just floods not just the airwaves but the brain waves.”

Merrill, Clinton’s longtime adviser, thinks the speech “broke the fever dream” of Trump’s hold on the Democratic psyche. And that may be true.

Hillary Clinton, rising to a moment nobody dreamed of a month ago, had liberated Democrats to move forward—and, in doing so, liberated herself as well.