Bill crowns Hillary’s historic day
Former President Bill Clinton portrayed his wife Hillary yesterday as a dynamic force for change and a longtime fighter for social justice as he made a case for her historic 2016 bid for the White House.
The ex-president told the Democratic Party convention in Philadelphia that Hillary Clinton was ‘‘a natural leader’’ with an inbuilt sense of responsibility.
‘‘Hillary is uniquely qualified to seize the opportunities and reduce the risks we face, and she is still the best darn change-maker I have ever known,’’ he said.
Earlier in the day, Hillary Clinton secured the Democratic Party’s nomination for the November 8 election, coming back from a stinging 2008 defeat in her first White House run and surviving a bitter primary fight to become the first woman to head the ticket of a major party in US history.
Bill Clinton told the convention in a keynote speech that Hillary had been an activist for social justice since the couple’s early days as law students together.
He told how she gave legal aid services to poor people and went undercover to expose a segregationist school in Alabama in the 1970s.
He cited her work as first lady in winning congressional approval for a children’s health insurance programme and a bill that made it easy for parents to adopt children.
The 42nd president said she worked with Republican House leader and fierce Clinton critic Tom Delay on the adoption bill. Bill Clinton said she did it because ‘‘she’s a change-maker. That’s what she does.’’
After a tough battle with US Senator Bernie Sanders during the state-by-state nominating contests, Hillary Clinton is now the party’s standard-bearer against Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Her husband was president from 1993 to 2001, and left office with high approval ratings and is known as one of the most powerful political orators in the country.
His speech offered an unusual twist to the warm spousal endorsement of a presidential candidate traditionally given in party conventions by a wife, not a man – let alone a former president of the United States.
Hillary Clinton’s nomination was a milestone in America’s 240-year-old history. US women got the right to vote in 1920 after ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.
Supporters say her Washington credentials show she has the experience needed for the White House during troubled times as the US tries to speed up its economic recovery and faces security challenges abroad.
Detractors view her as too cozy with the establishment and say she carries political baggage dating to the start of Bill Clinton’s first White House term in the 1990s.