Michael Bloomberg’s speech made the Hillary hater’s case for Hillary

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s speech offered essentially the only hint you are going to hear at the 2016 Democratic National Convention of a basic reality of American politics: Lots of people don’t love Hillary Clinton, and their reasons for that aren’t all crazy or wrong.

But Bloomberg says even people who don’t love Hillary Clinton should vote for her:

Now, I know Hillary Clinton is not flawless; no candidate is. But she is the right choice — and the responsible choice — in this election. No matter what you may think about her politics or her record, Hillary Clinton understands that this is not reality television; this is reality.

This argument — that the responsible thing to do is to vote for Clinton — is one that’s been widely circulated on the internet in the form of internecine arguments between Clinton backers and Bernie Sanders backers. But that argument usually ends up taking the direction of talking about the platform and Clinton’s progressive bona fides and the Supreme Court and so on and so forth.

Bloomberg is making a purer form of the argument — one that’s aimed at centrist and center-left voters. He’s saying that Clinton, for better or worse, is a regular politician who will do regular stuff. You might not like it. But things will be basically fine. At worst, you’ll vote her out in four years. With Trump, there’s honestly no guarantee that there even will be an election in four years.

Conventions are mostly about party unity, and that means pumping people up about Hillary Clinton. It means reminding progressives of Clinton’s long record of work on behalf of progressive causes. It means getting younger women who voted for Bernie Sanders excited about the prospect of a woman in the White House.

But lots of people are just never going to be excited about voting for Hillary Clinton. And Bloomberg’s message is that just because you’re not excited about voting for Clinton, that’s no reason not to do it. A bunch of high-profile Republicans — from George W. Bush to John Kasich to Mitt Romney — have declined to endorse Trump. What Bloomberg is saying is that if you have those kinds of views, you shouldn’t just stay vaguely disaffected — you should vote for the other candidate.