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Philadelphia / AFP
President Barack Obama will step onto the Democratic convention stage on to champion former political foe Hillary Clinton, defend his own legacy and bury Donald Trump’s chances of reaching the White House.
Obama will address the penultimate night of the party convention in Philadelphia, making the case that America’s first black president should be followed by its first female president. Clinton on Tuesday became the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major US political party, teeing up a November showdown with Donald Trump.
Democrats had “put the biggest crack” yet in the glass ceiling for women, she said in a video message to the convention.
Delegates earlier heard a deeply personal testimonial from former president Bill Clinton, who described a great friend, wife and mother who suffers the slings and arrows of politics to be “the best darn change-maker” Americans could hope for.
The current commander-in-chief is likely to offer a harder edge.
Expect Obama to “focus on how Secretary Clinton has the judgment, the toughness, and the intellect to succeed him in the Oval Office,” said White House spokesman Eric Schultz.
– Dimming limelight –
In the twilight of his second term, Obama faces ever-dwindling opportunities to address the nation, mold his legacy and influence the 2016 race. But on Wednesday, the 44th president has a prime-time chance when he appears before thousands of delegates in Philadelphia and tens of millions of viewers at home.
The White House says Obama has been working on his speech for weeks. Yet this touchstone presidential moment has been a decade or more in the making. The address will bookend Obama’s career-launching address to the Democratic convention in 2004, his contentious 2008 primary battle with Clinton and his eight years in the White House.
Aides said Obama will make a familiar case for what has been achieved during his presidency, highlighting America’s recovery from the Great Recession.
That is something the White House believes Obama does not get enough credit for.
Obama will also try to leverage his vast popularity among Democrats to unify a party scarred by the bruising primary campaign between Clinton and leftist Bernie Sanders.
The four-day confab in the City of Brotherly Love has so far been anything but fraternal.
Obama refuses to rule out ‘Russia trying to tip US vote’
Washington /Â AFP
President Barack Obama has refused to rule out the possibility that Russia is trying to sway the US presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.
“Anything is possible,” Obama told NBC News in an interview due to air Wednesday—the furthest the US government has gone in pointing the finger at Russia for a vast release of Democratic National Committee emails by WikiLeaks. Russia has dismissed the allegations it was involved as “absurd”.
Obama said the FBI continues to probe the leak, which showed apparent DNC bias toward Hillary Clinton over rival Bernie Sanders.
The leak was a howling embarrassment for the Democrats at their convention this week in Philadelphia. The Clinton campaign says cyber-experts it has hired have suggested Russia was to blame and its goal was to help the Republican presidential candidate Trump.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that US intelligence agencies now have “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of the emails.