MAKE AMERICA GREATER!
Clinton accepts historic nomination
Lays out vision for U.S., blasts Trump
NEWS SAYS: Vote Hil, vanquish Don
PHILADELPHIA — A week after Donald Trump’s fear-mongering national convention speech, Hillary Clinton fired back a defiant answer in hers: “We are not afraid.”
Clinton accepted the Democratic presidential nomination to become the first woman to lead a major party, warning the country is at a “moment of reckoning” and calling for unity against Trumpist terror.
She laid out a steady case against the Republican presidential nominee’s gloom and doom blather of America in decline in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. “Our founders embraced the enduring truth that we are stronger together. Now America is once again at a moment of reckoning. Powerful forces are threatening to pull us apart. Bonds of trust and respect are fraying and just as with our founders there are no guarantees. It truly is up to us,” she said.
“We have to decide whether we all will work together so that we can all rise together,” Clinton said.
In perhaps the biggest speech of her career, Clinton made it clear which side she was on — and what she thought of Trump.
“He’s taken the Republican Party a long way, from ‘Morning in America’ to midnight in America. He wants us to fear the future and fear each other,” she said. “He wants to divide us from the rest of the world, and from each other.”
The former secretary of state, New York senator and First Lady admitted that in spite of decades in public service and the national spotlight, she’s not always good at opening up to the public.
“The service part has always come easier to me than the public part. I get it that some people just don’t know what to make of me,” she said.
But she described herself as a details-oriented policy wonk focused on results.
“It’s true: I sweat the details of policy. Whether we’re talking about the exact level of lead in the drinking water in Flint, Mich., the number of mental health facilities in Iowa, or the cost of your prescription drugs,” she said. “Because it’s not just a detail if it’s your kid, if it’s your family. It’s a big deal. And it should be a big deal to your President.”
The speech had some soaring rhetoric. But Clinton kept to her
policy wonk self, rarely reaching the heights that President Obama or First Lady Michelle Obama did in speeches earlier in the week.
One major exception: Her nod to history was a stirring moment in the Wells Fargo Center.
“Tonight, we’ve reached a milestone in our nation’s march toward a more perfect union,” she said. “Standing here as my mother’s daughter, and my daughter’s mother, I’m so happy this day has come.”
As much as laying out her biography, Clinton looked to prove to America that Trump isn’t just a normal Republican, but that he can’t be trusted to run the country.
“Ask yourself: Does Donald Trump have the temperament to be commander-in-chief? Donald Trump can’t even handle the rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign,” she said.
“Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons,” Clinton said.
And she made it clear she saw the role of keeping Americans safe included reducing gun violence, while firing back at the caricature that she wanted to end the Second Amendment.
“I’m not here to take away your guns. I just don’t want you to be shot by someone who shouldn’t have a gun in the first place,” she said.
The speech was punctured with scattered boos and chants from the “Bernie or Bust” hardliners left in the audience, who in pockets of one or two dozen kept breaking into chants and triggering chants of “Hillary” and “U.S.A.” throughout the hall.
She ignored the protesters — but offered an olive branch to Bernie Sanders’ supporters watching on TV, thanking him and them for putting “economic and social justice issues front and center where they belong.”
“Your cause is our cause,” she said.
Clinton was introduced by her daughter Chelsea, who humanized her by talking about the stacks of notes she’d leave when she had to travel for work, one for each day “in a special drawer,” before discussing her “fierce sense of justice and a heart full of love.”
“How does she keep going amid the sound and fury of politics? Here’s how: Because she never, ever forgets who she’s fighting for,” she said to cheers.