Hillary Clinton accepts Democrats’ nomination, thanks Bernie, pushes ‘together’ message

Hillary Clinton, former first lady of Arkansas and the United States, accepted the Democratic Party’s historic nomination for president Thursday after being introduced by her daughter, Chelsea.

Clinton thanked a host of her fellow Democrats, including her husband Bill, President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Biden and her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, and in the end, her rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. She also made a plea for Sanders’ supporters.

“I’ve heard you,” she said. “Your cause is our cause. Our country needs your ideas, energy and passion. That is the only way we can turn our progressive platform into reach change for America. We wrote it together, now let’s go out and make it happen together.”

Still, her speech was interrupted numerous times by the crowd chanting “Hillary! Hilllary!” in an effort to drown out protesters.

Clinton said the Founding Fathers, who met in Philadelphia, the same city where the Democratic National Convention was being held, created a new nation by coming together and compromising. She made a plea for unity.

“Our founders embraced the enduring truth that we are stronger together,” she said, echoing her campaign slogan.

She said her opponent, Donald Trump, seeks to divide Americans from the rest of the world and from each other.

“He’s taken the Republican Party a long way from morning in America to midnight in America,” she said. “He wants us to fear the future and fear each other.”

She spoke against Trump’s plan to build a wall on the Mexican border, saying instead the country would create a path to citizenship, and spoke against his calls to ban Muslims from entering the country. Referring to Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention, she said, “Don’t let anyone tell you that our country is weak. We’re not. Don’t let anyone tell you we don’t have what it takes. We do. And most importantly, don’t believe anyone who says, ‘I alone can fix it.’ … Americans don’t say, ‘I alone can fix it.’ We say, ‘We’ll fix it together.’”

She criticized Trump for declaring bankruptcy multiple times, failing to pay his bills and hurting small business owners and contractors, and criticized him for manufacturing products overseas. He said he is in the “pocket of the gun lobby.” She asked if he has the temperament to be president and said he had been unnerved by the campaign.

“A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons,” she said.

Clinton referenced her lengthy career in politics as first lady, senator and secretary of state. She said in “public service,” the “service” comes easier to her than the “public.”

“I get it that some people just don’t know what to make of me,” she said.

She gave a history of her family – of her father, who played football at Penn State and enlisted in the Navy and then worked to give her a better life, and of her mother, abandoned as a child. Her mother taught her, “No one gets through life alone,” she said.

She talked of her work with the Children’s Defense Fund, which led her to believe, “To drive real change, you have to both change hearts and laws.” She acknowledged that her nomination was the first time a major party has nominated a woman for president, saying, “When any barrier falls in America, it clears the way for everyone. After all, when there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit.”

She praised Obama and Biden for leading the country through the economic recovery. However, more work needs to be done, and Americans are right to be frustrated, she said.

She said her priority would be to create good jobs and pledged to appoint Supreme Court justices to get money out of politics and, if necessary, pass a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United decision. She called for increasing the minimum wage, expanding Social Security and providing a tuition-free college education to everyone in the middle class. She said Wall Street, corporations and the super rich will pay higher taxes.

“It’s wrong to take tax breaks with one hand and give out pink slips with the other,” she said. “And I believe Wall Street can never be allowed to wreck Main Street again.”