Hillary Clinton celebrated her status as the first woman to win a major party’s presidential nomination on Tuesday evening in Brooklyn – and then turned quickly from history to politics, attacking GOP rival Donald Trump as a bully who wanted to “take America backwards.”
“To be great, we can’t be small,” Clinton told a cheering crowd in Brooklyn, previewing a general-election campaign in which she will attack Trump as vulgar, erratic and divisive. Clinton cast the election as a test of national identity: “This election is different. It really is about who we are as a nation…We are better than this. We won’t let this happen in America. And if you agree, whether you’re a Democrat, Republican or independent, I hope you will join us.”
Clinton’s speech came on a night when she primaries in New Jersey and New Mexico, and lost the caucuses in North Dakota to rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.). Races in two other states – South Dakota and Montana – remain too close to call, with Clinton narrowly in the lead in both. Polls in California, the biggest prize of the night, closed at 11 p.m. Eastern time.
