Bill Clinton is set to speak at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on Tuesday, July 26, two days before his wife, Hillary Clinton, is expected to accept the party nomination for president.
The 42nd president of the United States, 69, will take the main stage at Philly’s Wells Fargo Center to show his support for Hillary, 68, at approximately 10 p.m. ET. Us Weekly will be following the star-studded political event, which will also be livestreamed online, all week.
Bill’s speech on Tuesday night will be unprecedented, to say the least. He will be the first former president to speak in support of a spouse running for president.
Earlier this week, Hillary opened up about the potential rare role reversal during an interview with 60 Minutes. “I will be the president, but it does happen to be a historical fact that my husband served as president for eight years and there’s a lot that happened which helped the American people during those eight years,” she explained.
Two decades ago, Hillary was the one getting ready to speak on her husband’s behalf at the 1996 Democratic National Convention. “It takes a president who not only holds these beliefs but acts on them. It takes Bill Clinton!” the current presumptive Democratic presidential nominee told delegates at the time.
Bill’s aides and friends told the Chicago Tribune that his address on Tuesday “means more to him than any he has given this year, that it will be all about the Hillary he knows beneath the public image, that he is mostly writing it himself and that he cannot wait to deliver it.”
“No one can do a better job talking about the things that Hillary has done, the fights she’s taken on,” Hillary’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, told the newspaper on Tuesday. “Not the ones we know about, but the quiet ones.”
The former governor of Arkansas has previously spoken at nine conventions, most memorably in 2012, when he delivered a powerful 48-minute speech in support of President Barack Obama’s reelection.
Come back here to watch a livestream of Bill’s 2016 DNC speech, which will start at approximately 10 p.m. ET.
