A more perfect union

“Tonight, we’ve reached a milestone in our nation’s march toward a more perfect union: the first time that a major party has nominated a woman for president,” Clinton said as she accepted the nomination. “Standing here as my mother’s daughter, and my daughter’s mother, I’m so happy this day has come.”

It wasn’t the theme of her speech. But it was the unspoken subtext that ran through it. And Clinton took pains to frame the achievement not as the triumph of some subset of Americans, but as a victory for all Americans. She proclaimed herself both “happy for grandmothers and little girls,” but also “happy for boys and men—because when any barrier falls in America, it clears the way for everyone.” 

The Atlantic: A Truth Made Self-Evident, July 28, 2016 

The expanding and contracting sense of time — the feeling that Hillary Rodham’s youth was 12 minutes ago, and also so deep in the ancient past — reflects one of the surreal qualities of this historical moment, at which Hillary Clinton has become the first woman nominated by a major party for the presidency. It’s an event that seems to have been in the works for so long that it might as well have been prophesied, yet also to have taken so damn long. And this in turn reminds us of the strange distortions of history: Between Clinton and her predecessor, Barack Obama, our country’s first black president, it feels like the pileup of history-making has been so fast. And yet it’s been centuries of exclusion and impossibility that led us to Thursday night, when Hillary Rodham Clinton addressed the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, wearing the white of the suffragists and delivering a speech that built to a clear, confident crescendo, one that referred both to the country’s past and to the future she is promising: “I am here to tell you tonight,” Clinton said, “progress is possible.” 

NY Mag's The Cut: Hillary Is Poised to Make the ‘Impossible Possible’ — for Herself and for Women in America, July 29, 2016