For the first time ever, Americans will have the choice of a woman as their president. Hillary Clinton won’t have to worry about fighting off a challenge from Bernie Sanders based on technicalities. Clinton won enough votes in the last Tuesday of primaries to prevent Sanders from arguing that she was counting on delegates picked by the party, not voters. Even Sanders’ dream of winning in California, the nation’s most populous state, failed. He had hoped that might give him leverage to take to the convention but he lost by more than 400,000 votes. But at the end it was a somewhat boring evening that cable television had been trying to make it seem like it would be decided at the last minute or perhaps not until the Democrat convention in July in Philadelphia. The New York Times reported Sanders had already begun laying off workers. Even his threat to keep his campaign going drew mostly yawns. He was under pressure from President Obama to withdraw and most pundits expected he would comply within days. Clinton, whose husband, Bill, served two terms as president, has been playing down the fact that she would be the first female president. On Tuesday night she let it all out. “Tonight’s victory is not about one person. It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible,” she said. “In our country, it started right here in New York, a place called Seneca Falls, in 1848, when a small but determined group of women and men came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights,” she said in a speech in Brooklyn, N.Y. Many leaders around the world are likely to be happy to see her contesting Republican Donald Trump, who is considered too inexperienced to run the most powerful nation in the world. In her speech, she repeated an earlier comment, that the New York billionaire businessman was unfit to be president. “So we all owe so much to those who came before, and tonight belongs to all of you,” she added. She made special mention of her mother, Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham, who died in 2011. “I really wish my mother could be here tonight. I wish she could see what a wonderful mother Chelsea has become and could meet our beautiful granddaughter, Charlotte,” she said. “And of course, I wish she could see her daughter become the Democratic Party’s nominee.”
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Robert Weller
2016 US election news and other news from the USA
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Worked in journalism, including on the Internet, for more than 40 years. Started as a news editor at the Colorado Daily at the University of Colorado, joined a small Montana newspaper, the Helena Independent-Record, and then United Press International. Archives
November 2016
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