The long journey from Seneca Falls to Hillary 2016
The long journey from Seneca Falls to Hillary 2016
(CNN)The long wait ended Tuesday night with a woman center stage, arms outstretched. It could be measured in years: 240 after the birth of the United States, 96 after women won the right to vote, eight after coming tantalizingly close -- and falling short. It could be measured in hours: 24 since history crept in quietly, waiting, yet again, for a moment to roar.
On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton finally embraced a landmark long in the making, claiming victory as the first woman to lead the presidential ticket of a major political party. "Thanks to you, we've reached a milestone," she told a cheering crowd. "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."
Gender politics is an infinitely complicated subject, and Clinton, the 68-year-old pioneering presumptive female nominee who has spent three decades in public life, is an infinitely complicated figure. The 2016 campaign will test societal dreams and expectations about the role of women in public life in new ways.
But for one night, the grays of gender politics -- and politics in general -- were dulled by the bright strokes of history.
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It was a moment for mothers to think of their daughters, and of their own mothers and grandmothers who would have cherished the image on their screens but did not live to see it. Clinton has acknowledged that she lacks the natural rhetorical gifts of her husband, Bill Clinton, and the man who defeated her, Barack Obama. But she stood up to the moment -- in big, symbolic nods to the roots of the suffrage movement and in small, intimate ones to her own family. She offered a moving tribute to her late mother, Dorothy Rodham, who would have recently turned 97. "She was the rock," Clinton said, adding, "I really wish my mother could be here tonight."
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http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/08/politics/hillary-clinton-historic-nomination/
