Hillary Clinton urges Americans to rally around Kamala Harris: ‘a fresh start’
Hillary Clinton has issued an impassioned call for Americans to rally around the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, saying that the “time for hand-wringing is over” and the challenge now is to mobilize around her “unifying vision”.
Writing in the New York Times, the former US secretary of state and two-time Democratic presidential candidate said she was “excited” about the prospects of Harris taking on and defeating Donald Trump in the November election.
“She represents a fresh start for American politics,” Clinton said.
Related: ‘I was not voting before, now I am’: gen Z voters on what they think of Kamala Harris
Clinton was one of the first influential Democrats to endorse Harris for the party’s nomination after Joe Biden stepped aside on Sunday. Within a couple of hours she issued a joint statement with the former president Bill Clinton in which they expressed fears about the “threat posed by a second Trump term”.
In her New York Times op-ed, Clinton warned, based on her own experiences of running for the White House in 2008 and then as the Democratic nominee facing Trump in 2016, that “Harris’s record and character will be distorted and disparaged by a flood of disinformation”. She added: “I know a thing or two about how hard it can be for strong women candidates to fight through the sexism and double standards of American politics.”
During the 2016 race, Trump repeatedly denigrated her, calling her “pathetic” and encouraging his rally crowds to chant “Lock her up!”
Clinton said that Harris was “chronically underestimated, as are so many women in politics”. But she stressed that she was confident that the vice-president, who has attracted the support of enough Democratic delegates to secure the Democratic nomination next month, could defeat Trump.
She cited Harris’s work as the lead voice within the Biden administration on reproductive rights in the wake of the US supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade. She also said her experience as a “savvy former prosecutor” would be a bonus in a fight against Trump as a convicted criminal. “It’s old grievances versus new solutions.”
Time may be short, she wrote, but recent elections in Britain and France had delivered big victories to left-leaning entities in even less time.
“Ms Harris will face unique additional challenges as the first Black and South Asian woman to be at the top of a major party’s ticket,” Clinton wrote. “That’s real, but we shouldn’t be afraid. It is a trap to believe that progress is impossible.”