Sign up for Inside Washington’s daily email to get exclusive U.S. reporting and analysis delivered straight to your inbox
Get our free Inside Washington email
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton represented the old and new guard of Democratic women who are committed to making Kamala Harris America’s first female president on the first night of the convention.
The two speeches reflected an effort to unite the party establishment with its progressive, insurgent wing.
Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat and self-described democratic socialist, received rounds of applause and shouts of her initials “AOC” as she praised President Joe Biden, Harris and her running mate Tim Walz while sharply criticizing former President Donald Trump.
Ocasio-Cortez tried to link her own past as a bartender before entering politics to Harris’ working-class background.
“I’m here tonight because America has a rare and precious opportunity before it,” she said. “With Kamala Harris, we have the chance to elect a president who is for the middle class because she comes from the middle class.”
Ocasio-Cortez, a supporter of Palestinian rights, also sought to reassure progressives that Harris shared their concerns about the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
“She is working tirelessly to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza and bring hostages home,” she said. Ocasio-Cortez also sharply criticized Trump for his attempt to portray himself as the vanguard of the working class.
“We know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and bribing his Wall Street friends,” she said. “And I, for one, am tired of hearing that a little anti-union activist thinks he’s a bigger patriot than the woman who fights every day.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s big appearance comes four years after she was given just one minute to speak on behalf of voters who supported Bernie Sanders, the two-time Democratic presidential candidate who lost the nomination to Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016.
Clinton, for her part, fired up the crowd, leading chants of “Keep going” to encourage them not to give up on their goal of breaking one of America’s last glass ceilings: electing a woman to the highest office.
Clinton was greeted with a standing ovation and one of the loudest cheers of the night as she took the stage. In her remarks, she linked Harris’s candidacy to the suffragists who fought for women’s suffrage, to trailblazing politicians Geraldine Ferraro, the first female vice presidential candidate, and Shirley Chisolm, the first woman to run for president in 1972, as well as to Harris’ mother – and her own. Clinton said she wished both of them could live to see this moment.
“I wish my mother and Kamala’s mother could see us,” she told the United Center. “They would say, ‘Keep going!'”
Clinton called accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 the “greatest honor of (her) life” and celebrated her performance in the election that year, despite her loss to Trump, as a sign of progress in American history.
“Nearly 66 million Americans voted for a future where our dreams know no limits,” Clinton told the cheering crowd, adding, “Together, we have made many cracks in the highest and hardest glass ceiling.”
The former New York senator, first lady and secretary of state said progress is not guaranteed.
“We have to fight for it. And we must never give up,” she said.
He delivered the two speeches on the first evening of the convention, before Biden took the stage to deliver the keynote address.
Last month, he announced that he would not run for the Democratic presidential nomination and endorsed Harris.
Since then, Democrats have overwhelmingly rallied behind Harris. At the same time, a group of Democrats who voted “undecided” in the primaries in protest against Biden’s support for Israel continued to express their objections and hope that Harris would change their policies.
