Hillary Clinton may seem an odd figure to serve as a defender of the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a champion of the honor of John McCain, and a critic of the economic prescriptions of Depression-era Democrats, but 2016 has been nothing if not surprising.

What the former secretary of state’s presidential campaign had billed as a foreign-policy address, in San Diego on Thursday, was, in fact, an attack on her presumptive Republican rival, Donald Trump. And in pivoting toward the general election, Clinton also pivoted toward the center.

“He had the gall to say prisoners of war, like John McCain, aren’t heroes,” Clinton averred, drawing boos from the animated crowd of partisan Democrats.

She attacked Donald Trump’s assessment of the weakness of American leadership. To illustrate her case, she chose a 1987 full-page newspaper advertisement authored by Trump, in which he attacked Ronald Reagan’s supposedly wilting spine. “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure,” the advertisement read. Two years later, the Berlin Wall came down. Two years after that, Communism in Europe perished.