Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photo of graph by Thinkstock.
Chelsea Clinton’s speech on Thursday night at the Democratic National Convention worked in large part because it was full of precise, and often deeply personal, details about her mother. As Slate's Ruth Graham notes, it stood in pointed contradistinction to those given by Donald Trump’s children, which “made their father sound inspirational but barely involved in their lives.” More tellingly, though, there’s now objective evidence that people were actually listening carefully to even the most minor asides in Chelsea Clinton’s paean to her mother.
Many of the most deeply felt moments in Clinton’s speech came when she alluded to her family’s love of books and reading. Painting a picture of her mother as someone who was always there for her, she recalled, “My earliest memory is my mom picking me up after I’d fallen down, giving me a big hug, and reading me Goodnight Moon.” Later, she described the way her parents would challenge her to describe what she had learned at school each day, adding, “I remember one week talking incessantly about a book that had captured my imagination, A Wrinkle in Time.”
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