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Clinton casts herself as the unifier against polarising Trump

We’ll discuss that and more this Sunday on Face the Nation.

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Welcome to the “anti” election.

“What’s the difference in what I told you and what they said?” Does anyone really believe that she made nearly $100,000 from a one-time trade in cattle futures in 1978-1979 just by reading the Wall Street Journal, as she claimed in 1994? She concluded: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons”. I mean, that is a scary thought’. Trump used the line in the midst of a response to a question from Maria Bartiromo during a Fox Business Network debate, when asked about South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s reference to Trump as one of “the angriest voices”. Yet in taking Donald J. Trump to task in her own right, Clinton fired a warning shot across the bow; this woman is not one to be trifled with.

Democrats usurped the Republican establishment’s message.

Trump was officially named the GOP presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention on July 19.

Clinton chided Reagan’s party for abandoning the former president’s “Morning in America” campaign slogan in favor of “Midnight in America”.

During her speech, Clinton said the country was at “a moment of reckoning”, presenting herself as the responsible choice for president instead of Trump. A pair of Republicans even spoke on Clinton’s behalf.

“I am watching Crooked Hillary speak”. Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again.

Still, there were encouraging low-key signs of progress and many, of course, that were notably absent from the RNC convention.

Trump refrained from embracing the same sentiment during the Republican convention, but he said Friday that he was starting to agree with it.

But, as Trump himself pointedly noted Wednesday, Democrats only minimally decried instability overseas, making few references to terrorism and the Islamic State until Wednesday night, while challenging GOP allegations of a breakdown of law and order at home. In the glow of the event, there should be an immediate bump for Hillary, but whether it lasts is dependent on the willingness of Bernie Sanders voters to unite behind Hillary or decamp to the Greens.

My overriding impression from four days of the convention in Philadelphia is just how confident the Democrats are about this election.

Yet the party couldn’t control what happened off stage – and a lot did. For example, there was a prominently-placed, pleasant lounge area set aside for breast-feeding or pumping for new moms, which I took as the DNC’s tacit acknowledgment that plenty of women-like Chelsea Clinton, who has a five-week-old baby but was clearly working the convention every night on behalf of her mother-really don’t posit the role of mother against that of worker, but comfortably wear both hats at once.

Party leaders did what they could to put out the fires. Together, both were reminders of the awkward, problematic, and complicated relationship that Hillary and Bill Clinton have to the decades-long the War on Drugs and the mass incarceration of black and brown people.

The knives came out for Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

In fact, Day 4 of the Democratic convention probably should have been a travel day. It particularly enjoys having black and brown Americans over as guests-on two occasions it even let one of them sit at the head of the table.

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She spent the rest of the week holed up in a private Wells Fargo Center suite, fending off rumors that she planned to fly home as story after story citing mostly anonymous sources blasted her leadership. But Democrats took barely 24 hours to force Wasserman Schultz’s resignation, convincing her before the convention began to prevent an ugly scene by relinquishing the opening gavel. In the language of politics, this sort of testimonial is said to “humanize” her-as if her origin derived from a different species.

Democratic Party convention