Hillary Clinton’s speech Monday night was the most, among many, inspiring to me on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention. I saw far more than what was on the surface when she spoke so eloquently and with such passion at the prospect of Kamala Harris being elected the next president of the U.S.
This was a battered but not beaten woman, against whom all the furies of hell had been unleashed to deny her the presidency in 2016. There were bruises and scars, blood stains and bloodied bandages, tears and a fierce, resolute anger for visionaries to see there. I’m sorry, but no one on that stage Monday night had gone through what she has to be able now to stand tall, speak loudly and boldly herald the very real prospect for the first ever woman to rise to the highest office in the greatest democracy on this planet.
Taking nothing away from Kamala Harris to be sure, but it was Hillary Clinton who dove headlong into a wall of ferocious male chauvinist hate and resistance to move the ball, so to speak, to within inches of the goal. As Kamala barges across the goal line this fall, it will be Hillary who will be cheering the loudest because she suffered so many of the sacrifices that will have made it possible. She’s the one who got the nation to see, to envision, this shining future.
Apologies for substituting metaphors related to a sporting event over ones about cracks in glass ceilings, but you get the idea.
Two of the photos I have up in my office that I value the most are of me with Hillary in one, and with Joe in the other. In the former, I am chatting with Hillary along with Mary Meredith, a huge Hillary fan and mother of my long time friend and now CEO of Boomi, David Meredith, at an event at the Clinton home in D.C. sometime in the 1990s. In the latter photo, I am posing with a big grinning Biden, his left arm around my back, and legendary LGBTQ+ pioneer and my friend, the late Frank Kameny, with Biden’s right arm around his back. It was at a small White House event when Biden was VP and had beaten President Obama to the punch by coming out publicly in support for gay marriage in 2009.
As limited as it may be, I have used my “inside the Beltway” weekly general interest newspaper, the mighty Falls Church News-Press, in as many ways as possible to stand for the kind of justice-seeking, honesty, truth telling and compassionate qualities that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden have brought to their jobs leading our nation and the world.
Since our Day One in March 1991, 33 years ago now, my newspaper has published a Seven-Point Platform that we have strived to live up to. It was written by the legendary Thomas More Storke, an FDR supporter who as a youngster in 1900 bought and developed what became the Santa Barbara (Calif.) News-Press. That was where I got my first paying newspaper job as a sophomore in high school. The News-Press’ Platform was printed in every edition of that daily newspaper such that it was the framework for everything not just the newspaper, but the entire community, collectively strived for.
Sadly, upon his retirement, Mr. Stroke sold his paper in the 1960s and subsequent deals found it in the hands of the New York Times for a period, and then acquired by a wealthy local who was a rightwing type, totally out of step with the community that the paper and its platform had helped shape, and the paper nosedived, going completely under in recent years.
That Seven-Point Platform has been published in my newspaper every week since its founding in 1991 contains the kernels of what makes my newspaper tick, especially in terms of its so-called “business plan” being summed up in the last of the seven points, “Make the paper show a profit it you can, but above all, keep it clean, fearless and fair.”
That value defines Joe and Hillary, to our nation’s undying benefit.
