Preceded by a video proclaiming “women’s rights” victories from the past, and chants of “Madame President!” from her adoring crowd of supporters at her Brooklyn campaign headquarters Tuesday night, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton declared herself the victor of the Democrat primary eight years to the day from giving up the contest to Senator Barack Obama in 2008.
She proclaimed herself the victor while demurring to the ebullient 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.
The announcement was made possible by her victories in four of the six state primaries on Tuesday, including especially the delegate-rich states of New Jersey and California. On Wednesday the Democratic delegate count, according to Real Clear Politics, showed Clinton winning 73 delegates in New Jersey to Sanders’ 47, and 257 delegates in California to Sanders’ 188. This informally put Clinton over the top with 2,755 total delegates (earned and captured) to Sanders’ 1,852. Clinton needs only 2,382 delegates to win at the Democrat convention in Philadelphia in July.
When superdelegates — Democrat party bigwigs, such as governors, senators, and representatives, who now make up 15 percent of Democrat primary delegates — are removed from the equation, however, Clinton is still 198 votes shy of capturing the nomination. What Sanders is hoping for, despite the math and pressure from the party to go away, is that he can capture enough of those superdelegates in Philadelphia to wrest the nomination from Clinton. After calling Clinton to offer his congratulations on her win in California, Sanders delivered his own speech to supporters saying he would soldier on:
We are going to fight hard to win the primary in Washington, D.C., and then take our fight for social, economic, racial and environmental justice to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
I am pretty good at arithmetic, and I know that the fight in front of us is very, very steep, but we will continue to fight for every vote and every delegate we can get.
At the moment Sanders has 1,804 delegates won, plus 38 superdelegates that he has tentatively captured. If he keeps those superdelegates in his corner, he needs 525 of Clinton’s 571 superdelegates to push him over the top.
For Clinton, it’s over, and just beginning. In her victory speech, she rolled out the talking points she’ll be using against Donald Trump, including claims that a Trump presidency would take the country backwards economically, divide the nation along racial, ethnic and gender lines, and undermine foreign alliances. She added, “Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit,” with the last of her sentence drowned out by the raucous crowd of supporters.
She added:
It’s clear Donald Trump doesn’t believe we’re strong together. He has abused his primary opponents and their families, attacked the press for asking tough questions. He wants to win by stoking fear and rubbing salt in wounds and reminding us daily just how great he is.
Well, we believe we should lift each other up, not tear each other down….
We all need to keep working toward a better, fairer, stronger America. Bridges are better than walls.
On Monday she begins her campaign for the presidency with trips to Ohio and Pennsylvania, while Trump has promised a major policy speech concentrated on Clinton’s corrupt history. At a rally from one of his golf courses in suburban New York City, Trump said on Tuesday:
The Clintons have turned the politics of personal enrichment into an art form for themselves. They’ve made hundreds of millions of dollars selling access, selling favors, selling government contracts, and I mean hundreds of millions of dollars.
For all intents and purposes the primaries are over and the general election campaign has begun. The two conventions scheduled for July will merely formalize the obvious: Clinton vs. Trump for the presidency.
At the moment, betting websites are showing Clinton winning the presidency in November in a walk.
A graduate of an Ivy League school and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
