Clinton’s task: defending U.S. from barbarian at the gate
A woman in charge. Of saving America’s democracy. Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday with a speech in which she positioned herself as the only candidate of the country’s values, the task ahead as no less than defending the world’s greatest power from a barbarian at the gates.
“America is once again at a moment of reckoning,” Clinton said. “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. We have to decide whether we’re going to work together so we can all rise together.”
Clinton’s historic address was designed in part to show voters a gentler side of the guarded fighter they had come to know. But its focus was the dire threat posed by Republican nominee Donald Trump to the security, diversity and even liberty of a thriving nation very different than the dystopia of his dark imagination.
“He wants to divide us from the rest of the world and from each other. He’s betting that the perils of today’s world will blind us to its unlimited promise,” Clinton said. Invoking president Franklin D. Roosevelt, she said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
“Don’t let anyone tell you that our country is weak. We’re not,” she said, and “don’t listen to anybody who says ‘I alone can fix it.’ Americans don’t say ‘I alone can fix it,’ ” she said. “We say, ‘We’ll fix it together.’ ”
Reaching out to non-Democrats con- cerned about Trump, she vowed to be “a president for Democrats, Republicans, independents, the struggling, the striving, the successful.”
Clinton waited until nearly half an hour into the address to explicitly acknowledge the landmark moment: she stood on stage at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia as the first female nominee of a major U.S. party.
She said her accomplishment was a victory for men, too.
“When any barrier falls in America, it clears the way for everyone,” she said. “After all, when there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit.” Clinton was preceded by her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, who attempted to persuade Americans to consider a former secretary of state, senator and first lady as a “wonderful, kind, thoughtful, hilarious” mother and grandmother. “My earliest memory is my mom picking me up after I fell down, giving me a big hug, and reading me Goodnight Moon,” Chelsea Clinton said. “From that moment to this one, every single memory I have of my mother is that, whatever’s happening in her life, she’s always, always, there for me.”
Clinton, who trails narrowly in opinion polls, is widely viewed as the more knowledgeable and experienced candidate, but she is also seen as dishonest and untrustworthy by nearly two-thirds of the voting public.
Trump’s ferocious criticism of a country he sees as a “divided crime scene” left an opening for Clinton to wrap herself and her party in the flag, adopting the patriotic language and symbols usually more common at Republican conventions.
In perhaps the most dramatic moment of either convention, Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim war hero killed in Iraq, challenged Trump by whipping a pocket Constitution from his suit jacket.
“Let me ask you: Have you even read the U.S. Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy,” Khan said. “In this document, look for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of law.’ ”
Khan’s dare both awed and pained conservative elites astonished that their party had surrendered its traditional themes.
“I cannot believe I’m watching the Democrats become the party of patriotism,” Steve Deace, a right-wing Iowa radio host, wrote on Twitter.
Retired Marine General John Allen, former leader of the coalition fighting ISIS, followed Khan on stage, appearing with a group of other military leaders. As the Democratic delegates chanted “U-S-A,” he shouted a request for Americans to reject Trump’s vision.
“This is the most consequential race for the presidency in memory.
“When any barrier falls in America, it clears the way for everyone. After all, when there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit.” DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE HILLARY CLINTON
The stakes are enormous,” Allen said.
“We must not, we could not, stand on the sidelines. This election can carry us to a future of unity and hope, or to a dark place of discord and fear. We must choose hope.”
Clinton sought to reach out to “anxious” voters seduced by Trump’s promises to somehow eradicate the Daesh terror group “so fast” and somehow repatriate factories lost to Mexico and China.
Her convention mentioned the economy only occasionally. But her “primary mission as president,” she said, “will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages right here in the United States.”
“Especially in places that for too long have been left out and left behind,” she said. “From our inner cities to our small towns, Indian country to coal country. From the industrial Midwest to the Mississippi Delta to the Rio Grande Valley.”
The convention was held 692 kilometres and a planet away from last week’s dark Republican gathering in Cleveland.
Seizing the optimistic Reaganesque brand of patriotism Trump has abandoned for fury and fear, Clinton’s campaign depicted an ascendant America whose Obama-era progress would be jeopardized by the bigoted, ignorant “con man” on the other side.
The duelling conventions are always meant to serve platforms for different visions for the country. These particular conventions revealed a vast chasm even in the parties’ assessments of the country. Trump, focused on the damage wrought by trade deals and the peril posed by Muslim terrorists and Hispanic illegal immigrants, described a crippled America whose citizens are suffering and whose best days are in the past unless he wins.
Clinton, emphasizing the Obamaera progress of minority groups, described an ascendant and generous America whose past meant suffering for many of its inhabitants.
Defying her reputation, in some quarters, for centrism, Clinton promoted an aggressive brand of socialpolicy liberalism. She pledged that she would fight until the bitter end for gun control, reform the immigration system to help illegal immigrants, raise the minimum wage, and pass a constitutional amendment to limit the influence of billionaires on elections.
Where a Republican speaker led a chant of “all lives matter,” the Democrats featured speaker after speaker who said “black lives matter.” Where the Republican convention was preoccupied with the danger “radical Islamic terrorism,” the Democratic convention spent far more time on the danger of gun violence.
Where the Republicans celebrated the acquittals of officers charged in the Baltimore death of Freddie Gray, the Democrats heard from the mothers of black men controversially killed by the police. And where Trump congratulated his delegates merely for clapping for the one gay speaker, Democrats featured a long procession of gays and lesbians — and then, on Thursday, Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender person to speak at a convention.
Her long list of prominent surrogates was a testament to a party far more united than the warring Republicans. Boisterous first-day dissent from loyalists of defeated leftwing rival Bernie Sanders was almost entirely squelched by day four, with the impassioned help of Sanders himself, though a few diehards attempted to interrupt her speech with shouts.
“I want you to know: I’ve heard you,” she said in an olive branch to the Sanders army. “Your cause is our cause.”