Fifty years after India had a woman at its helm in the person of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the United States may finally be catching up by trying to put its first woman in the White House Oval Office as the Democratic Party took the first concrete step on Tuesday by nominating Hillary Clinton as its nominee for the 2016 presidential race.
American media outlets went gushing with stories of Clinton making history as the country’s first-ever female presidential nominee of a major political party, while the candidate herself emerged in a video by cracking a glass ceiling, literally and figuratively, amid scenes of wild jubilation at the party convention in Philadelphia.
“What an incredible honour that you have given me, and I can’t believe we just put the biggest crack in that glass ceiling yet,” Clinton said via satellite from New York while a video montage showed the faces of all 44 male presidents so far in the 228-year history of American elections. She will be delivering her formal address of acceptance on Thursday night.
“This is really your victory. This is really your night. If there are any little girls out there who stayed up late to watch, let me just say I may become the first woman President. But one of you is next,” Clinton remarked as celebrations broke out on the convention floor.
At hand for the occasion was her husband and America’s 42nd President, Bill Clinton, who took the podium and embarked on a sentimental journey, beginning with the couple’s courtship as students at Yale in 1971 and hailing Hillary as “the best darn change-maker I’ve ever met in my entire life”. Clearly, that was meant to trash Republican rival Donald Trump’s depiction of her wife as “Secretary of Status Quo”.
In remarks that were aimed to “humanise” his wife and project her “personable” qualities at a time when polls point to her high unfavourables, Bill Clinton said: “Hillary is uniquely qualified to seize the opportunities and reduce the risks we face….You could drop her into any trouble spot, pick one, come back in a month and somehow, some way she will have made it better. That is just who she is.”
The celebrations on the convention floor were briefly marred by a protest walk-out from a section of supporters of Bernie Sanders, not reconciled to Clinton’s nomination that was preceded by a formal roll call of votes. Outside the convention venue that had been turned into a well-protected fortress, a large number of Sanders supporters and an assortment of other groups kept up their protests.
Having already conceded defeat and endorsed Clinton, Sanders himself asked convention officials to suspend the process and nominate his erstwhile rival by acclamation. In the roll call, Clinton secured 2,842 delegates as against Sanders’ 1,865 delegates.