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Today we begin with further coverage of the reaction to Hillary’s remarkable foreign policy speech that focused on the unsuitability of her opponent Donald Trump. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo observes how Trump has been flustered and put off balance by the speech.
But after two rallies and a flurry of interviews there's no question Clinton has gotten to Trump in a big way. As she said, he is very thin skinned. (Emphatically denying that you're thin-skinned is not a credible rebuttal.) Given who he is, being denigrated by a strong woman must cut deeply. Underneath the angry talk, he appears befuddled and uncertain about just how to respond. That is mainly because even before her assault he'd maxed out his invective. She was crooked, a liar, untalented, a lightweight, a sexual predator by proxy. How exactly do you escalate from there?
His furious effort to wring more aggression out of the English language has proved a rather unconvincing rebuttal to her central charge that he is temperamentally unfit, too emotionally unstable to serve as President. He now says flatly that she should be in jail, says he'll find an Attorney General who will imprison her[…]. He's trying to escalate but has little room to go. He's maxed out. The transcripts of the two speeches read like compressed literary spittle.
His affect is also different. Both rallies struck me as significantly hotter than anything we've seen before from Trump, more sweat, more chopping hands, more yelling - simply more electric, frenzied and angry.
As Clinton and her team certainly anticipated, hitting him hard as mentally unstable and unfit for the presidency has placed Trump in a sort of Chinese finger puzzle of his own creation. The only mode of response he knows - an escalating and bellicose round of personal attacks with increasingly hyperbolic accusations - only confirms Clinton's diagnosis. The harder he fights the tighter the charge sticks.
The campaign this weekend assembled many of the extended points of the foreign policy speech into brief items that make a very punchy case.
It's been U.S. policy for decades to prevent more countries from obtaining nuclear weapons and reduce the number of nuclear weapons worldwide. But Trump believes that “at some point,” we would be “better off” if Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia get one. And if the thought of nuclear proliferation under Trump’s watch isn’t frightening enough, consider this: He says “we need unpredictability” when it comes to nuclear weapons—one of the most reckless statements made by a major presidential candidate in memory.
More analysis of the speech continues to flow even five days later, as teacherken covers in his diary this morning quoting analysis by E. J. Dionne.
Through the weekend, Hillary continued to campaign hard in California, in advance of that state’s Tuesday primary. She began the day attending church services at the Greater St. Paul Church in Oakland, as reported by the Mercury News.
The Democratic front-runner began her day in Oakland, a place that has a special place in her heart. She spent the spring of 1971 in the city with her future husband, she said, after getting her first legal job with the Children's Defense Fund.
Standing before the black congregation of the Greater St. Paul Church, she promised that, if she becomes president, she will greet each day with the question, "What can I do that day to make it possible for every child to live up to their God-given potential?"
And in a smart move for any candidate stopping in the Bay Area, she brought up the Warriors, who would go on to crush the Cleveland Cavaliers that evening at nearby Oracle Arena. She claimed the city compares favorably to its basketball team, a group of people who "work together, set their goals" and "even when the stars get injured, people pull together."
"I see Oakland pulling itself upward and onward," she said.
Clinton's message of raising the minimum wage, working for income equality, creating more jobs, reducing gun violence and making college affordable was greeted with "Amen" and "That's right" from the churchgoers.
"I want to reform the criminal justice system," she said. "I want us to be able to eliminate what is called the 'cradle-to-prison' system (in favor of) the cradle-to-college-to-career pipeline.
She then went on to the Good Day Cafe in Vallejo to meet community leaders.
The former secretary of state spent Sunday afternoon in a somber policy conversation with community leaders in Vallejo, one of a number of such talks she's been holding in California before the state's Tuesday primary.
Clinton discussed criminal justice reform, education and health care with a few dozen people crowded into Vallejo's Good Day Cafe….
Clinton stressed that it was important to work together to improve communities, saying "too many people are retreating or are protesting. We've got to hit the sweet spot in the middle where people roll up their sleeves."
Somehow, Clinton found the energy to continue on to another event in Sacramento on Sunday, from which the Sacramento Bee assembled an wonderful collection of Tweets. The Mercury News piece mentioned above also covered this event:
But she reserved her most pointed attacks for presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, saying he isn't "fit to be commander-in-chief."
She criticized Trump for ridiculing American allies and praising dictators and suggesting that families of terrorists should be killed. She told the crowd in Sacramento how, when she was secretary of state, American forces took Osama bin Laden's family to safety before blowing up their disabled helicopter and fleeing themselves. That, she said, is what American honor is all about.
She also mocked Trump's criticism of her for "playing the women's card" in her bid for president. But she told the crowd, as she has told other throngs across the country, that if that means supporting equal pay to help families manage their bills, "Deal me in."
Today her schedule shows appearances in Lynwood, Los Angeles, Long Beach, all capped by a Concert in Los Angeles’s Greek Theatre featuring stars such as Christina Aguilera, Andra Day, John Legend, Ricky Martin, and Stevie Wonder.
Over the weekend, two primary contests were held in which Clinton had very favorable results.
- Virgin Islands — Clinton won delegates 6 to 1, per fivethirtyeight (AP says 7-0)
- Puerto Rico — Clinton won estimated 36 to 24 on a vote split of 59%-38% (Greenpapers, hard)
There will likely be further follow up on the long lines that affected Puerto Rico voters in the Democratic primary after polling sites were drastically cut.
ABC’s count puts Clinton just 27 delegates short of clinching the nomination on the basis of a majority of all delegates.
Following the results from the Puerto Rico primary Sunday night, the Democratic frontrunner had 2,356 delegates -- including super-delegate -- at this hour, according to a count by ABC News -- putting her just 27 delegates shy of the 2,383 needed to become her party’s presumptive nominee.
AP seems to show Clinton actually only 26 delegates shy right now.
However you push the count to the last delegate, Hillary Clinton is very close to achieving enough delegate support to secure the Democratic nomination for President of the United States!
The campaign scheduled an event in Brooklyn, NY on Tuesday after New Jersey primary voting finishes, and many observers proclaimed it looks like an opportunity to celebrate clinching the nomination on the same date as her 2008 concession speech acknowledging that Barack Obama had won the Democratic nomination that year.
Clinton will celebrate Tuesday's primaries in her home state of New York with a campaign event at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, not far from where her campaign is headquartered.
Her campaign sees this as a turning point night when she can officially turn her sites on unifying the Democratic party and on going after presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Tuesday also marks exactly eight years to the date from when Clinton dropped out of the primary race against then-Senator Barack Obama in 2008.
Ginger McKnight-Chavers wrote a brief, thoughtful piece in Blue Nation Review about how the coverage so far of the presidential race has made many Clinton supporters feel invisible to the media.
Though Hillary has earned millions more votes than either Bernie or Donald, Hillary’s supporters, particularly female voters, are often deemed irrelevant in the media. And when we try to raise our voices, we are mocked, trolled, and verbally assaulted so persistently that the effort becomes daunting.
Between working, learning, raising families, caregiving, bettering our communities, and engaging in the real world around us, we don’t have the time or the patience to waste precious energy on fighting incessant harassment as the cost of participation.
The “saying nothing, talking loud” crowd (to paraphrase Earth Wind & Fire) may attempt to silence us. But we won’t remain invisible forever.
Bonus Tweets:
Have a terrific day, everyone!
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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.