Trump tweeted. “Crooked Hillary said that I ‘couldn’t handle the rough and tumble of a political campaign.’ Really, I just beat 16 people and am beating her!”
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On Thursday, Reuters reported that the party’s fundraising committee for candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives had also been breached, the second such incident after last weekend’s leak of DNC emails.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton drew 30 million television viewers for Thursday night’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, a tally that fell just over 2 million short of Donald Trump’s audience a week earlier in Cleveland.
The stakes are high: A loss to Mr Trump would not only end Ms Clinton’s political career, it could be a devastating coda to her and her husband’s political legacy and leave the Democratic Party weaker than it has been in a generation. Rather, Ms. Clinton is showing every sign of doubling down on the other attributes her surrogates ascribed to her in Philadelphia: toughness, relentlessness and resolve.
Part of that effort involves focusing on the threat Democrats say Donald Trump would pose to the country as president. They each used the word “historic” in their headlines and focused mostly on the fact that Hillary Clinton is a woman. In the language of politics, this sort of testimonial is said to “humanize” her-as if her origin derived from a different species.
“As of tomorrow, we have 100 days to make our case to America”, she said. How would he advise Trump to parry the attacks he faced from the Democrats at their convention?
For politicians, the true measure of the speech’s effectiveness will come in about a week, when polls indicate whether or not the convention gave Clinton a bump in popularity. He’s betting that the perils of today’s world will blind us to its unlimited promise, ” she told a rapturous Democratic flock where residual dissent seemed to die down as she reached out to the Bernie Sanders’ renegades. Cameras went to a split screen with Clinton and the Vermont senator, with the latter keeping a stone face. But dissatisfaction among Sanders delegates with the Democratic Party led to chanting even during Clinton’s speech and shouts of “no more war” when a Medal of Honor recipient spoke. He mostly left Trump alone, and instead recounted his courtship of Hillary, but notably, never directly referencing his marital troubles. How do you square it?
Viewership of Clinton’s speech on Fox News Channel was less than a third of what it was for Trump’s address, Nielsen said. The best line from the speech – “America is great because America is good” – was lifted without recognition from Alexis de Tocqueville from nearly two centuries ago. That demographic has eluded Clinton and was unlikely to be swayed by a Democratic convention that heavily celebrated racial and gender diversity.
Obama as well sought to take down Trump, whom he referred to as a “homegrown demagogue” who, he suggested, is not fit to be commander-in-chief. If the person at the top of the Democrats’ ticket was Mr. Obama – “the man of hope”, in Ms. Clinton’s phrase – that might be the dynamic that defines this race. It was in part personal, talking about her family and her advocacy for children’s issues. 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“, quoth Clinton.
Granted, the GOP nominee did implicitly criticize his female opponent for delivering her speech too loudly (which is a bit like Jeffrey Dahmer giving someone a hard time for eating non-free-range chicken).
“I didn’t produce our show”, Trump told the New York Times.
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The Philadelphia confab checked all the boxes on Donald Trump’s dark side.
