Hillary Clinton gave one of the most powerful speeches of her career in politics on Monday as she implored American voters finally to crack the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” that had eluded her so bitterly eight years ago.
In a rousing 15-minute speech at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, Clinton returned to the theme that she intended to invoke in a victory speech on election night, 8 November 2016. That speech was never delivered, the glass ceiling standing firm in the wake of her shock defeat to Donald Trump.
But what she had failed to attain was within the grasp of Kamala Harris, only the second woman to be nominated at the top of a major party presidential ticket.
And the man who had derided and humiliated Clinton on the campaign trail back in 2016, mocking her as “Crooked” and “Lyin’ Hillary”, was now on the defensive. “We have him on the run now,” Clinton said.
Reveling in the chance to turn the tables on Trump, Clinton drew a parallel between the slights she endured at the hands of the Republican candidate in 2016 and the insults he continues to hurl at Harris in 2024. “It is no surprise that he is lying about Kamala’s record, he is mocking her name and her laugh. Sounds familiar?”
Clinton compared Trump’s record as a convicted felon with Harris’s as a former prosecutor. “As a prosecutor, Kamala locked up murders and drug traffickers. Donald Trump fell asleep at his own trial.”
At that moment the thousands of Democratic delegates amassed on the DNC floor spontaneously burst into chants of “Lock him up! Lock him up!” It was an ironic echo of the chant that was repeatedly directed against Clinton by Trump supporters, with his blessing, in 2016.
Clinton, with the diplomacy behoving a former secretary of state, made no comment. But the way she nodded her head in synch to the chants spoke volumes.
Clinton made little effort to hide that for her the hope of pushing Harris into the White House as the first female US president was profoundly personal. “We are so close to breaking through once and for all,” she said, conjuring up the image of Harris raising her hand “on the other side of that glass ceiling” to take the presidential oath of office.
“This is our time America. This is when we stand up, this is when we break through.”
But her vision was also historical. She set it in the context of her mother, Dorothy Howell, born in 1919, a year before American women got the vote.
She name-checked Shirley Chisholm, who in 1972 became the first woman to run for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination. And she recalled taking her daughter Chelsea Clinton in 1984 to see the first female vice-presidential nominee of a major US party, Geraldine Ferraro.
Then Clinton directly faced up to her own excruciating disappointment in losing to Trump eight years ago. In what came across as a conscious effort finally to heal that terrible wound, as much for herself as for Harris and other American women who come after her, she portrayed the defeat as only a beginning.
“We refused to give up on America. Millions marched, many ran for office, we kept our eyes on the future of America,” she said. “When a barrier falls for one of us, it falls for all of us.”
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