Former first lady Hillary Clinton rallied the Jewish Labor Committee at its annual human rights awards dinner in New York on Monday, urging members to “get to work” to oust Donald Trump from the White House.
Clinton’s roughly 12-minute talk featured the usual attacks on her political nemesis, praise for the event’s award winners, and a call to action in 2020 to “get our country back,” The Times of Israel reports.
“We’ve never seen such cruelty and contempt for the values that we pledge allegiance to, that we see embodied in our constitution, that we have fought to make a more perfect union over all these years together,” the 72-year-old said.
“And the current administration – I don’t need to tell you – has been conducting a concerted attack on the rule of law, on the importance of our government and the services it provides for people,” she said. “They’ve attacked journalists and the freedom of the press, and in fact, they’re waging a war on democracy.”
That war needs soldiers, and Clinton made it clear she expects New York City’s Jewish labor leaders to be on the front lines fighting for Democrats.
“It would be easy to walk away and say ‘I can’t deal with this. I can’t tell fact from fiction. I don’t wanna live in an alternative reality. I’m checking out,’” she said. “Well that’s what the other side wants us to do, my friends. They want us to just throw our hands up in despair and say somebody is going to have to continue the fight, I can’t do it any longer.”
Instead, it’s time for team Democrats to get “gutsy,” she said – a plug for her new book.
“We all need to be, women and men alike, gutsy in this time, because it’s not going to be easy, I’ll tell ya,” Clinton said. “We’re going to have a tough election in 2020. It shouldn’t be. Anybody with eyes to see and ears to hear should already be convinced, right?
“But it’s gonna be a tough election and you need to bring your organizing skills, your shared sense of values, your feeling of empathy and compassion and caring, your deep conviction about justice, because we’re gonna need every single person in this fight,” Clinton said.
“So enjoy this holiday season, and come the new year let’s get to work and make sure that we get our country back.”
The rallying call comes on the heels of a new poll that puts Clinton at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket for 2020, should she decide to run.
The Harvard-Harris Poll conducted late last month puts former vice president Joe Biden at the head of the current crop of Democrats vying for the 2020 nomination with 29 percent support among likely Democratic voters. Biden is trailed by socialist Senator Bernie Sanders with 16 percent, Senator Elizabeth Warren at 13 percent, openly gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana Pete Buttigieg with 8 percent and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg at 7 percent.
But when voters were posed with the hypothetical Clinton candidacy, the numbers shifted significantly.
With Hillary Clinton and former secretary of state John Kerry in the race, Clinton would become the frontrunner with 21 percent support, followed by Biden with 20 percent, Sanders with 12 percent, Warren with 9 percent and Buttigieg and Kerry with 5 percent each, The American Mirror reports.
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