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Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton represented the old and new guard of Democratic women pushing for Kamala Harris to become America’s first female president during the first night of the party’s convention.
The dual speeches showed an effort to unite the party’s establishment with its progressive insurgent wing.
Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat and self-proclaimed democratic socialist, received ovation after ovation and chants of her initials “AOC” as she praised President Joe Biden, Harris, and her running mate Tim Walz while also lambasting former president Donald Trump.
Ocasio-Cortez sought to tie her own background as a bartender before she entered politics with Harris’s working-class background.
“I am here tonight because America has before us a rare and precious opportunity,” she said. “In Kamala Harris, we have a chance to elect a president who is for the middle class because she is from the middle class.”
Ocasio-Cortez, a supporter of Palestinian rights, also sought to assure progressives that Harris shared their concerns amid the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
“She is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home,” she said. Ocasio-Cortez also blasted for Trump for trying to make himself seem like a vanguard of the working-class.
“We know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing palms of his Wall Street friends,” she said. “And I for one am tired of hearing about how a 2 bit union buster thinks of himself as more of a patriot than the woman who fights every single day."
Ocasio-Cortez’s star-turn comes four years after she was given only a minute to speak on behalf of voters who supported Bernie Sanders, the two-time Democratic presidential candidate who lost the nomination to Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016.
Clinton, for her part, fired up the crowd, leading chants of “keep going” to not give up the goal of shattering one of America’s last glass ceilings: the election of a woman to the highest office.
Clinton was greeted by a standing ovation and one of the loudest cheers of the evening as she took the stage. In her remarks, she tied Harris’s candidacy to suffragists who fought for women’s right to vote, to female trailblazing politicians Geraldine Ferraro, the first female vice presidential nominee, and Shirley Chisolm, the first woman to run for president in 1972, as well as Harris’s mother — and her own. Both of whom, Clinton said, she wished could see this moment.
“I wish my mother and Kamala’s mother could see us,” she told the United Center. “They would say, ‘Keep going!”
Clinton called the acceptance of the Democratic nomination for president in 2016 the “greatest honor of [her] life”, and went on to celebrate her performance in the election that year as a mark of progress in American history, despite her defeat to Trump.
“Nearly 66 million Americans voted for a future where there is no ceiling on our dreams,” Clinton told the cheering audience, adding: “Together, we put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling.”
The former senator of New York, first lady and secretary of state said that progress was not guaranteed.
“We have to fight for it. And never, ever give up,” she said.
The two speeches came on the first night of the convention before Biden took to the stage to give the headline speech.
Last month, he announced that he would not run for the Democratic nomination for president and endorsed Harris.
Since then, Democrats have overwhelmingly rallied behind Harris. At the same time, a contingent of Democrats who voted “uncommitted” in the primary as a protest against Biden’s support for Israel continued to express their objections and hopes that Harris would shift policy.
