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Good morning Hillary-supporting community! It is great to be with you. Let’s get started with some Hillary goodness
First off: campaign news! Hillary gave a major speech yesterday relating to military issues, It posited the United States as a world leader, but also emphasized the need to lead humbly, as well as to serve America’s veterans.
I must admit, as someone who grew up on both sides of the Canada-US border, talk of American exceptionalism usually makes me twitch. But Clinton’s definition, acknowledging the distinctively huge economic and military power of the US while emphasizing the need to seek international cooperation, sits a lot better with me than do the usual USian discussions of “exceptionalism.”
Still, though Secretary Clinton opened the speech by saying she was going to limit the politics, it was a political speech. In this season, it could hardly be otherwise. But it was a political speech of a very different stripe than those we’ve heard too often this year (and which we’ll hear again tonight when Trump gives his latest spin on immigration).
The United States is an exceptional nation. I believe we are still Lincoln’s “last best hope of Earth.” Still Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.” Still Robert Kennedy’s “great unselfish country.”
Instead, it was a call to treat the military, and particularly veterans, in a nonpartisan manner and an attempt to assert American exceptionalism as not just a call to lead, but a call to lead “humbly.”
Hillary will be back on the trail for Labor Day. She’ll visit the 11th Congressional District Community Caucus Labor Day Festival with Tim Kaine, She’ll also visit the Hampton, Illinois 49th Annual Salute to Labor.
In other campaign news, Tim Kaine concluded his visit to Pennsylvania with a trip to Lehigh Valley. According to local news, it was a successful appearance:
Kaine, in an appearance streamed live on WFMZ.com, took the stage shortly before 1:30 p.m. and spoke for nearly 40 minutes. He started on a positive note, praising the qualifications, work ethic and plan for the country of running-mate Hillary Clinton, which, the pair said, will create more than 400,000 jobs in Pennsylvania. "I'm happy to be a strong guy to support a strong woman," Kaine said. ...For Becky Cotter, her daughter, Josephine, and mom Pat, the event produced the selfie of a lifetime. "For three generations of women in the same family to get a picture with hopefully the next vice president of the United States under the first woman president," she said.Kaine and Anne Holton, to whom he is married, will be swinging through New Hampshire next:
The powerhouse Democratic couple—Kaine, a Virginia senator, and Holton, the state’s former secretary of education—are set to swing by campaign field offices in Dover and Laconia during the first half of the day Thursday.
In the afternoon, they will take part in an education round-table at Manchester Community College with Dr. Susan Lynch, the wife of New Hampshire’s former four-term governor, John Lynch.
They will also visit a local Democratic National Committee office in Nashua later in the afternoon for a “women to women” phonebank.
As reported yesterday at Daily Kos, the NY Times has a piece on Obama’s efforts to turn out his coalition for Clinton:
“The president’s focus is on getting the Obama coalition to the polls,” said Jen Psaki, the White House communications director.
Most of his appearances will be timed to coincide with voter registration deadlines and the start of early voting, White House officials said. On Sept. 13, for example, Mr. Obama will appear at a rally in Philadelphia, four weeks before the last day that Pennsylvanians can register to vote.
Neither the Clinton campaign nor the White House has announced any more appearances, in part because they want to be able to send Mr. Obama where they think they need him most. But his visits are likely to be concentrated in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Nevada and Iowa, campaign officials said. Mr. Obama will generally campaign without Mrs. Clinton.
Hillary was not impressed with Trump’s trip to Mexico:
xTrump just failed his first foreign test. Diplomacy isn't as easy as it looks. -H
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 1, 2016And of the course, the campaign asks: Donald Trump is about to meet the president of Mexico. Which of these tweets might they discuss?
At Blue Nation Review, observers note that Trump’s declarations have a lot of her vs. himself about them:
When he calls Hillary a “bigot,” he is really talking about himself. When he says that Hillary gives speeches that are devoid of policy, he is really talking about himself. When he accuses her of asserting that she has claimed to be able to solve systemic injustice, he is projecting onto her the claims he’s made.
...Every negative thing Trump says about Hillary is a disclosure about himself. The answer to the ubiquitous rhetorical “how can he so utterly lack self-awareness” is that he doesn’t. He knows himself very well indeed. He just projects his worst qualities onto other people.
Hillary said in her powerful speech detailing his mainstreaming of white nationalism that “there’s no other Donald Trump. This is it.” He has, she noted, “shown us exactly who he is. We should believe him.”
Clinton’s response to Trump:
The Clinton campaign's tough language about Trump came after the former secretary of state on Wednesday urged veterans at an American Legion conference to reject the mogul's view of the world, arguing he doesn't have what it takes to build and maintain alliances."You don't build a coalition by insulting our friends or acting like a loose cannon. You do it by putting in the slow, hard work of building relationships. Getting countries working together was my job every day as secretary of state," Clinton said. "It's just like building personal relationships -- people have got to know they can count on you -- that you won't say one thing one day and something totally different the next."
The former secretary of state pledged on Wednesday that, as president, she would "never, ever disrespect Gold Star families who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation or prisoners of war who endured so much in our name.""And it says a lot about the person doing the insulting."
Clinton continued her outreach to Republican voters as well Wednesday, pledging before a somewhat muted crowd to "be a president for Democrats, Republicans, independents, for people who Pennsylvania vote for me, for people who don't, for all Americans."Clinton landed an endorsement from a Pennsylvania nurse’s union:
Registered nurse Patricia Eakin, president of the local nurse’s union, says they met with former Democratic presidential hopeful and doctor Howard Dean in support of Hillary Clinton.
“The goal of the roundtable was to have a forum where we announced that our union, PASNAP, is endorsing Hillary Clinton for president,” Eakin explained, “and to have a roundtable discussion about healthcare and other issues with Howard Dean.”
“I wanted to thank the nurses for their endorsement,” Dean said. “Nurses are some of the best public servants in the country and the all work really hard and they show up and they vote, so for them to endorse Hillary is really a big deal.”
Over at Autostraddle, Carmen has an interesting post about how women’s issues are shaping this election:
In a feat of analysis never done before, Ms. crunched numbers on the gender gap and spoke to experts in the realm of politics and feminism for a recent report on how women will shape the 2016 election. In that feature, they spotlight the issues women voters put first: the economy and workplace issues, equality and equal representation, abortion and health care, LGBT rights (thanks ladies!), sexual violence, the environment and renewable energy, and national security. It’s also been noted that women voters are more invested than men in issues of education, gun control, and — duh — lady stuff like childcare. It isn’t shocking, then, that in a political landscape where more women than men are expected to turn out and most of them hate Donald Trump so fucking much, these issues sound awfully familiar. But what’s harder to grasp is how revolutionary this turn of events truly is.
When I spent twelve hours of my life watching political advertisements from the dawn of time to analyze the way women were portrayed in them, what stood out to me was that women’s faces and voices and bodies were present in the political discourse of their eras, but their issues weren’t. Instead, women were props — innocent faces to threaten with nuclear war, kind housewives to sing to you about a man who was gee golly gosh darn such a good choice for the Oval Office, and emotional wrecks talking about the pain of mismanaged political battles. Women were there to convey a point crafted by men, for men, and targeted toward other men. Women were never the voters in question — they were merely the messengers for the “actual voters,” imagined, of course, to be men.How times have changed.
At the center of this marked shift, too, is a woman herself. Hillary Rodham Clinton came out of the gate in the primary season putting the issues that shape the gender gap — and reflect a growing feminist praxis among voters — first and foremost. She embraced running as openly female, rejecting campaigning as “one of the boys” and instead set forth with a new purpose: women to the front. She gave a spotlight specifically to the mothers of Black Americans shot by police. She came out aggressively in support of gun control, with one-woman-revolution Erica Smegielski leading that fight for her on the campaign trail in honor of her mother, who died at the Sandy Hook massacre. She’s carved out policies on labor rights that center around equal pay, paid family leave, and raising the minimum wage. She’s come out swinging in support of affordable, high-quality childcare. She actually says the word “abortion” and refuses to let politics trump women’s healthcare.
Finally, at GayStar News, Eric Turner explains his new movement, HunksForHillary, and his journey to Hillary Clinton:
I’ve not always been a fan of Hillary Clinton.
There. I said it. It’s out. You see, growing up in a conservative Mormon household (Mormons are the most-Republican voting block in the entire US, with over 80% of Mormons identifying as Republican voters) my view of the world was shaped by the things I heard from a young age. And as a child of the 80’s, that means I was an impressionable teenager during the Clinton presidency. From the things I heard discussed working on the neighbors farm or at the dinner table, my opinion of both Bill and Hillary Clinton was formed.
So it wasn’t until I got out into the world and experienced life for myself that I realized that everything I thought about the Clintons was nonsense.Half of it was blasting Bill for policies that we actually all benefitted from anyway. And the other half was just sexist bullshit, because Hillary was a strong woman: and men felt threatened by having such a strong woman stand as the first lady.
I learned of Hillary’s involvement in getting low-income children healthcare. I learned of all the good President Clinton had done since his presidency to help the people of the world and that after Hillary left the State Department, she joined him in that cause.I learned that Hillary Clinton had done great things for New York as Senator during 9/11. The point is, that once I finally stepped back and looked at the facts, objectivity led me to reason that Hillary Clinton had done incredible things for America
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Crossposted at HillaryHQ, an independent, progressive blog committed to the electing Hillary Clinton as the next President of the United States. If you would like to support @Scan and his work there, visit GoFundMe and make a donation.
(Header image by Barbara Kinney for Hillary for America. Used under Creative Commons License.)