Hillary Clinton, commentators agreed, needed to hit it out of the park with her speech Thursday night. She went into her convention either tied with Donald Trump or perhaps even slightly behind. Stalwarts of her party like the Obamas, Cory Booker, and her own husband put three runners on base by giving great speeches that offered compelling reasons for independents, and maybe even some Republicans, to vote against Trump. If she could hit a home run with her speech, she could put this game away. If she didn't ... well, at the very least, we were in for a long slog.
She didn't homer. Loyal Hillary Clinton fans praised her for ... "saying what she needed to." That's not praise you give a great speech. That's praise you give sixth graders who have just turned in their first five-paragraph essay.
The speech itself was mostly blandly unobjectionable: cliche-ridden, barren of memorable lines, structured along the lines of a grocery list rather than an argument. But it was fine. It made no major mistakes, and it checked off a lot of stuff that needed to be said to one interest group or another. In the annals of political speeches, it will be laid to rest with all the thousands of other utterly forgettable things that have been said by politicians at our conventions.