Barry Soper: History made after 240 years as Democratic National Convention

Opinion

It's the first time it's happened in America's 240 year history, that a male, let alone a former President, endorsed his wife as the next President of the United States.

It was pure schmaltz as Bill Clinton did what Melania Trump did last week, although in his case the words couldn't have been pinched from anyone else.

There was much speculation before he rose to speak about whether he'd do what he usually does, talk about himself and his record as President.

But right from the start it was about Hillary when he began in a Martin Luther King sort of a way by declaring that "in the spring of 1971 I met a girl" and for the best part of the next hour we heard about that selfless girl and how on his third attempt, after secretly buying a little house she had earlier admired on the Arkansas prairie, she agreed to marry him.

To counter Republican claims that she's stale and they'll effectively get another four years of Obamadom, the husky hubby said she was never satisfied with the status quo, she always wanted to move the ball on. The best darn change maker he'd ever known, he said in his Arkansas drawl.

He didn't over play the Trump card, other than painting him as a cartoon which he said were two dimensional, they're easy to absorb. But Clinton, who should know more than most, said life in the real world is complicated and real change is hard.

He'd worked the crowd into a lather and to their applause he congratulated them, saying they'd nominated the real one.

But for many, listening to the loving hubby and the family man, there was an elephant in the room and it wasn't the stampede of the Bernie Sanders supporters out of the auditorium before the speech began.

One who left the delegates in the auditorium in no doubt about the man Hillary Clinton will be facing in November was the one who originally broke the glass ceiling in the Clinton administration, the first female, formidible Secretary of State Madelaine Albright who visited this country in 1998.

Donald Trump, she said, has no credibility or standing to represent American interests abroad.

In a private message, away from the convention in an email to supporters she confided his small minded, unstable temperament, his shocking incoherence regarding the norms and details of foreign policy and his dangerous ideology, completely disqualify him.

Yeah well, that has yet to be tested.