Alabama a ‘turning point,’ Clinton tells packed event
Thousands packed Vancouver’s convention centre on Wednesday to cheer for Hillary Clinton on the last stop of a tour promoting the memoir of her 2016 election defeat.
Or, as event host Bob Rennie suggested, it was not a defeat but a stolen victory in a contest that has no prize for the person who takes second place. Clinton received nearly three million votes more than U.S. President Donald Trump.
“She is our legitimate president,” said Marci Haskell, who travelled from Bellingham, Wash., for the event with her mother Maggie Hanson.
Hanson, 87, said she has been an admirer of Clinton since 1995, when she stood up in Beijing and said women’s rights are human rights.
“She should be president right now. I’m heartbroken over it,” Hanson said.
The room was buzzing about Tuesday’s upset in Alabama’s special election for the U.S. Senate. Democrat Doug Jones defeated favoured Republican Roy Moore.
Clinton called the election of Jones a pivotal moment in U.S. politics. Moore, his opponent, faced several allegations of sexual misconduct but was personally endorsed by Trump.
“The combination of Roy Moore, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump proved to be too much. … For me, this was a very important turning point in holding President Trump and his most vitriolic, destructive advisers, led by Steve Bannon, accountable.”
Clinton said Jones was a fine man who had, in the 1990s, successfully prosecuted Ku Klux Klan members for the 1963 church bombings that killed four black girls in Birmingham, Ala.
Clinton gave a little advice on how to get back up after getting knocked down as she promoted her book What Happened. Chardonnay was mentioned several times, as was alternate nostril breathing — a yoga technique she recommends. And murder mysteries, if only because you know the bad guy is going to get found out in the end.
Cheers went up when Clinton declared there is “no such thing as an alternative fact,” and “I’m not going anywhere.”
Clinton said that had she been elected president, “We would not have pulled out of the Paris climate accord, we would not be talking about pulling out of NATO or cheering on Putin, or be incoherent in our approach to North Korea.”
Of all the things Trump has “done or said or tweeted,” Clinton said it was Trump’s impulsive online reactions to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s diplomatic efforts with North Korea that bothered her the most.
“The tweeting maybe is a result of an excessive amount of Diet Cokes. … I don’t know what that does to your brain,” she joked.
She riffed easily on Russian interference in last year’s U.S. election, Trump’s affinity for dictators, and fake news: “I don’t like the phrase ‘fake news’ … I like ‘lies.’ ”
Clinton also reflected on what inspires her, such as her mother’s ability to remain loving, kind and resilient despite a difficult childhood. Her mother’s example taught her how not to be bitter.
“For better or for worse, I’m going to keep fighting for what I think is right,” Clinton said.
Hanson said that like Clinton, she was not about to stop fighting for what was right — she laid down on the I-5 highway to protest the Vietnam War, she rallied alongside Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, she met Nelson Mandela and Rosa Parks, and Barack Obama — and she views Clinton as a civil rights change-maker of equal standing.
Although Clinton is not the president, Hanson and her daughter believe she has changed things.
“There is no ceiling anymore,” Haskell said. “This is a cultural moment. She did this.”