Clinton casts herself as the unifier against polarising Trump

Democrat issues call to unity as US faces ‘a moment of reckoning’ in November

If you were wondering what a President Hillary Clinton might sound like, just watch her speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday night.

Take out the many barbs aimed at Donald Trump, her Republican opponent in the November election, and this was a speech that resembled a presidential state of the union, a checklist of policies protecting the legacy of Barack Obama's liberal record and setting out her own, trying to coalesce Democrats under a progressive banner and win over the ABTs (Anybody But Trump).

She tried to give something to everyone here, supporters and detractors, and even appealed to her political opponents considering defecting to avoid a Trump presidency.

Unifying theme

The most unifying theme of Clinton’s speech did not relate to Trump, though her sharp attacks on the New York tycoon certainly gelled the Clinton and

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Bernie Sanders

camps, however briefly for the ideological liberal purists in the Vermont senator’s inner core.

It was the universal achievement of her historic candidacy as the first woman to accept the presidential nominee of a major political party that was the come-all-ye call. In the birthplace of the US, she broke a 240-year duck for American women and proclaimed “a milestone in our nation’s march towards a more perfect union”. She chose not to claim it solely as a victory for “grandmothers and little girls and everyone in between” but for “men and boys too”.

“When any barrier falls in America, for anyone, it clears the way for everyone,” she said.

This was the overarching message of the most significant political speech of Clinton’s four decades in the public eye: that the country does best when everyone stands as one. “That’s why ‘Stronger Together’ is not just a lesson from our history. It’s not just a slogan for our campaign. It’s a guiding principle for the country we’ve always been and the future we’re going to build,” she said.

Clinton’s pitch was the antithesis of Trump’s to Republicans in Cleveland where he played on the fears of Americans by offering a dark vision of the US as a frightened, terrorised and lawless nation that only he, the strongman outsider, could fix.

"Americans don't say, 'I alone can fix it,'" Clinton told the packed Wells Fargo Centre. "We say, 'We'll fix it together.'"

The contrasts between the two speeches suggest that Republicans and Democrats are at different stages: Trump spoke largely to his base, hoping to shore up the support of people alienated by his divisive candidacy and aggressive rhetoric; Clinton spoke to her base, her primary opponent’s supporters and beyond, in a pitch to be the unity candidate, and not just for her party.

Rhetorical firepower

“I will be a president for Democrats, Republicans and Independents,” she said. “For the struggling, the striving and the successful. For those who vote for me and those who don’t. For all Americans.”

Clinton lacked the oratorical and rhetorical firepower of the man she is hoping to succeed but this was a speech undoubtedly recasting Obama’s “no red states or blue states”. But it was a toned-down upgrade to avoid stoking the frustrations of people whose economic growth has stalled under the Obama years and who are backing a billionaire outsider in such large numbers to find another solution.

Her take-down of the businessman was masterful, questioning the temperament of a man to cope with the rigours of the country’s highest office when he “can’t even handle the rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign”. She borrowed a strategy from Lyndon Johnson’s brutally effective 1964 campaign against conservative Barry Goldwater, playing her own brand of fear-mongering against Trump’s and painting the billionaire as a madman who should never be allowed near the nuclear codes.

Global conflict

Clinton recalled Jackie Kennedy’s recollections of her husband’s fears when the world was pushed to the brink of an another global conflict during the Cuban missile crisis.

John F Kennedy

was concerned that “a war might be started, not by big men with self-control and restraint but by little men, the ones moved by fear and pride”.

And Clinton belittled Trump brilliantly, presenting him as a man who could lose his cool “at the slightest provocation” at a question from a reporter, when he’s challenged in a debate or when he sees a protester at a rally.

“Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis,” she said. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons” – a reference to his hissy fits on social media.

She raised the stakes for the November election, calling it a “moment of reckoning” for the US.

The biggest box not ticked by Clinton on Thursday was a response to the low level of trust people have in her. There was little or no case for the defence of “Crooked Hillary” – as Trump calls her – and with 100 days to the election, this was a mistake as it will be her most vulnerable flank.

Thursday’s speech helped shore up her defences elsewhere and set up clear lines of attack for the general election campaign ahead.