As the first woman to win the nomination of a major political party, Hillary Clinton strode to the stage at the Brooklyn Navy Yard Tuesday evening, opened her arms and embraced the historic moment. It was hard not to recall Helen Reddy’s “I am woman, hear me roar … ”
Some of the drama of Clinton’s claim as the presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic Party had been defused by a report from the AP that announced her victory before she could.
Even so, the momentous occasion needed Clinton’s words, her declarations to give it the proper exhilaration, which she did graciously, framing it all within a historical context.
“We’re all standing under a glass ceiling right now,” she said, “but don’t worry. We’re not smashing this one.” The reference was not wasted on her most devout followers, many of whom were disappointed eight years ago when she lost to President Obama, after tallying 18 million votes.
At that time, Clinton noted that she had cracked the proverbial glass ceiling, without forging a breakthrough. Maybe now it can happen with the nomination in hand as she moves to the general election against Donald Trump, the Republican presumptive presidential nominee.
Not so fast, countered Sen. Bernie Sanders in his late-night speech from California. “We will take this fight all the way to the convention in July,” he told his roaring supporters. “The struggle continues.”
After congratulating Sanders and his team for running a vigorous campaign, Clinton cited a number of historic milestones that made it possible for her to accomplish her goal.
Her victory, she said, “… belong[s] to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible.”
She added, “In our country, it started right here in New York, a place called Seneca Falls in 1848, where a small but determined group of women and men came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights … So we all owe so much to those who came before and tonight belongs to all of you.”
More personally, the victory belonged to her mother. Clinton stated that her mother was born June 4, 1919, the very day Congress passed the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. The bill was ratified in 1920. “And I really wish my mother could be here tonight,” she said. Her mother, Dorothy Howell Rodham, died Nov. 1, 2011.
She could have given the narrative additional historical fodder with the mention of Brooklyn Representative Shirley Chisholm, the first woman to run for the presidential nomination on the Democratic Party ticket in 1972.
History is one thing; the present is another. Looming before her was a specter that is haunting her and America—Donald Trump.
In assailing Trump, Clinton picked up where she left off last week in her speech on foreign affairs. “We believe that we are stronger together and the stakes in this election are high, and the choice is clear,” she said. Then she lowered the boom: “Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president and commander-in-chief.”
Still, Trump rages on while gathering more delegates in his race to Cleveland and the Republican convention. Each day brings another stab from Trump, and his attack on the judge adjudicating the Trump University case, has even taken a few of his party cohorts by surprise. Speaker Paul Ryan said that Trump’s comments about the judge, who was born in Indiana of Mexican immigrant parents, “are racist.”
“There is my African-American,” as Trump bellowed during one of his speeches, and he intends to make “America great again” are highly charged words. Clinton took him to task on the latter. “When he says ‘Let’s make America great again,’ that is code for let’s take America backwards,” she explained. In the Black community it has another meaning.
Although Clinton devoted much of her speech to Trump as she gears up for the next several months of intense campaigning, Sander’s continues to be nettlesome. Some of that sting may be minimized Thursday when he meets with President Obama. He can expect to be dressed down a bit and perhaps read the riot act on the need for party unity.
Oh, by the way, Clinton won four of the six primaries and caucus Tuesday, particularly the delegate-rich states of New Jersey and California. Only the D.C. primary remains for June 14, and by then we should know more about the party’s next moves as Clinton roars toward the general election.