Bill Clinton — doing his first rally for Hillary — talks about Franklin Pierce and Abraham Lincoln and the need for a President who fits the spirit of the times.

I jumped in somewhere in the middle, when he was reminiscing about his early years with Hillary, drawing from what was meant to seem like a wellspring of emotion. Tears didn't come, but tears were at least implied. What a humble servant of the poor young Hillary was, he wanted us to know.

Then he shifted, for the ending, into some theory of the presidency, about how Presidents succeed when they are right for the time. He talks about Franklin Pierce, who, he tells us, couldn't possibly have succeeded in his time, and then Abraham Lincoln, who, he informs us, wouldn't have been a great President if he'd served in the 1950s. Lincoln was "gripped with crippling depression," and that would not have been successful in the 1950s, but it was just the frame of mind, he tells us, to suit the Civil War.

I don't know if Bill thought that theory up on his own or got it from some American history scholar, but of course, it led to the conclusion that Hillary is what goes with the particular time that we are in now. What exactly is it about Hillary and our time that fit together so well? I don't think he explained it.

Were we supposed to infer that the other candidates, whatever their positive attributes, are somehow not what is needed for our time? I don't know if Bill meant us to think about that, but it called to mind for me something Donald Trump said in his "Face the Nation" interview yesterday:

[O]ur country has no spirit.... But I would be very enthusiastic, like I am right now, toward the country. We need spirit. We need a cheerleader. President Obama is a bad cheerleader. I thought he would be a good cheerleader. I thought he would be a great cheerleader, actually. That's the one thing I thought, is that he was going to be a great cheerleader. He was really a big divider. We need cheerleading.