TUESDAY: Hillary Clinton gave a speech!

TUESDAY, JULY 21, 2026

On balance, it didn't go well: What the heck is a "politics of meaning?" If we agree that our struggling nation needs a politics of that type, what kind of politics would we be talking about?

As anyone with eyes can see, our flailing nation badly needs a new type of politics. But what's a "politics of meaning?" 

Let's return to the first lady's speech, the one she gave in 1993.   

The first lady was Hillary Clinton. She was in her first year at that post. Perhaps unwisely, she delivered this address at the University of Texas n April 6 of that year. 

The governor of Texas was in the room, and that governor, the late Ann Richards, was actually a Democrat—and she was a woman to boot! Those were different times, but you could possibly squint and see the present day on the horizon. 

The first lady gave a speech in which she said that she could discern a "crisis in meaning" in our American lives. It probably wasn't wise to say that—especially for Hillary Clinton, who had already become a favorite punching bag of certain elements on the right and within the American press.    

She was moving out beyond the role our (unelected) first ladies had traditionally taken, and that may not have been wise. That said, how acute was this crisis—the shortfall of meaning in our lives? 

The crisis was fairly acute! Fairly early in her speech, the first lady even quoted the late Lee Atwater, a lifelong, extremely aggressive Republican strategist who had died in 1991 at just 40 years of age.

On his deathbed, he had famously referred, in a bit of a conversion, to "this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society—this tumor of the soul.” 

That statement "to me will be Lee Atwater’s real lasting legacy," the first lady said, occasioning applause. By the end of the speech, she was quoting Albert Schweizer seeming to say that, while sleeping sickness is a real disease, there is also "a sleeping sickness of the soul." 

Along the way, she had described her own vision in the manner seen here:

CLINTON (4/6/93): And what we each must do is break through the old thinking that has for too long captured us politically and institutionally, so that we can begin to devise new ways of thinking about not only what it means to have economies that don’t discard people like they were excess baggage that we no longer need, but to define our institutional and personal responsibilities in ways that answer this lack of meaning.

We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.

We need a new "politics of meaning," she said. We need to fill ourselves up again, thereby defeating this crisis of meaning.

The first lady was surely well intentioned. On the other hand, as a general matter, it probably isn't politically wise to talk like that—to tell several hundred million people about the malaise in which they're trapped, whether that word is employed or not.  

On balance, fairly or otherwise, that attempt to define a "politics of meaning" didn't go especially well, but by last week, we suddenly found ourselves longing for a second bite of the apple, for a new and improved such politics.   

In truth, our flailing nation badly needs a critter like that—a critter you might call a politics of meaning. We badly need a critter like that, but what would some such critter look like? What would a less destructive political culture possibly entail?

"Here comes the sun," George Harrison wrote. "It seems like years since it's been here."

Tomorrow: The late Michael Lerner