US faces moment of reckoning: Clinton
PHILADELPHIA: Hillary Clinton capped a four-day convention celebration with a plea for national unity and tolerance.
Now, one of the most divisive and distrusted figures in American politics must convince voters that she, rather than Republican rival Donald Trump, can bring a deeply divided nation together.
“America is once again at a moment of reckoning. Powerful forces are threatening to pull us apart,” Clinton said to a rapt Democratic convention audience. “And just as with our founders, there are no guarantees. It truly is up to us. We have to decide whether we all will work together so we all can rise together.”
After a convention speech aimed squarely at undercutting Trump, the first female presidential nominee embarks on a bus tour through two Rust Belt battlegrounds, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The shoot-from-thehip billionaire believes he can make headway in those states with bluecollar white men, a demographic that has eluded Clinton and was unlikely to be swayed by a convention that heavily celebrated racial and gender diversity.
Meanwhile, the father of a Muslim American soldier killed in Iraq posed a question to Trump: Have you read the Constitution?
To rapturous cheers, Pakistan- born Khizr Khan fiercely attacked the billionaire businessman at the convention, saying that if it were up to Trump, his son never would have been American or served in the military.
Khan said that Clinton, by contrast, "called my son the best of America."
Trump’s tweeted response to Clinton’s speech captured his pitch to those voters. He slammed the former secretary of state as an ineffectual defender against terrorism and blasted her judgment.
“Hillary’s vision is a borderless world where working people have no power, no jobs, no safety,” he wrote.
Starting with a rally Friday at Temple University, Clinton, accompanied by running mate Sen. Tim Kaine and their spouses, will focus on economic opportunity, diversity and national security, themes hammered home this week by an array of politicians, celebrities, gun-violence victims, law enforcement officers, and activists of all sexualities and races.
Their goal is to turn out the coalition of minority, female and young voters that twice elected President Barack Obama while offsetting expected losses among the white male voters drawn to Trump’s message. Democrats contrasted their optimistic, policy-laden message with the darker vision and less specific platform that marked Trump’s turn during the Republican convention a week earlier.
Clinton’s speech “was such a contrast with what we saw in Cleveland last week,” Kaine told CNN’s “New Day” Friday, who described the Republican convention as “dark and depressing.”