As Katie noticed, Bill Clinton couldn’t stay awake during his wife’s historic speech at the Democratic National Convention Thursday night.
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The air in the convention hall was thick with anticipation, and women delegates and party members smiled exuberantly.
Clinton spoke of the strains that have been placed on USA society during the toxic year-long campaign featuring heated rhetoric from Trump and other candidates.
“Tonight, we’ve reached a milestone in our nation’s march toward a more flawless union: the first time that a major party has nominated a woman for president”.
Donald Trump Jr. claimed on social media that that a line from his speech to the Republican Convention – “that’s not the America I know” – was pinched by the US President.
But the “America I know” refrain, and its variations, is a common phrase used by former USA presidents including Mr Obama himself and also George W. Bush.
But she spent considerable energy berating her November election rival, saying no Americans should trust a candidate who pledges that “I alone can fix it”, as Trump said last week in Cleveland.
Compassion is a laudable quality in any leader.
Instead, she presented herself as a dedicated and indefatigable fighter for children, the disabled, blue-collar workers, women and the poor, while promising a backbone of steel as she vowed to take out ISIS. In the language of politics, this sort of testimonial is said to “humanize” her-as if her origin derived from a different species. Hillary Clinton today has a big rally here in philly and then she and her vp pick Tim kaine head out on a bus tour to these battleground states of Pennsylvania and OH, robin and George, you said it, 101 day, here we go. She talked about her family and the lessons she learned from her parents while growing up. “But we are not afraid”, Clinton said. “Not Democrats, not Republicans, but us as a human race, as people who need to work together to keep us strong”.
Following a spate of killings by police of African-American youths and massacres of police officers, Clinton laid out a firm stance on gun control, vowing that America should not have a president in the “pocket” of the gun lobby.
As much as this was crafted to give the viewers at home insight to Clinton the person, and to draw attention to issues she champions, it also countered the sexist narrative of her put forth by the right (and some on the left) as a power-mad and greedy usurper. There is no other Donald Trump. “I loved Bernie, but that’s why I have to vote for Hillary”, said Herring, who made signs reading “He has my heart, but she has my vote”.
“America is once again at a moment of reckoning”.
Her critique of Trump’s temperament was a clever turn of the gender tables, attributing to her male opponent the sort of character weakness sexists often attribute to women. Donald Trump can’t even handle the rough and tumble of a presidential campaign. “He loses his cool at the slightest provocation-when he’s gotten a tough question from a reporter, when he’s challenged in a debate, when he sees a protester at a rally”. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons”.
You know who’s been baiting Donald Trump with tweets? Her mother-a motherly mother, a womanly woman who looms large in Clinton’s autobiography.
Trump eventually concluded with “no one has worse judgement than Hillary Clinton – corruption and devastation follows her wherever she goes”. She cried, not tears of joy, during Clinton’s speech.
Helping Clinton with her task of appearing as the steady hand at the tiller were retired USA military generals, Republicans furious over the rise of Trump, and in one of the night’s most poignant moments, a Muslim father with “undivided loyalty” to America and whose son was killed in a suicide bombing in Iraq.
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Adele M. Stan is AlterNet’s senior Washington editor, and a columnist at The American Prospect.
