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Hillary Clinton delivers the commencement address to Yale undergrads on Sunday.
Despite the Trump administration’s corruption, lies and attacks on the rule of law, Hillary Clinton is filled with hope for the country’s future — more now, she said, than even when Obama took office a decade ago.
“I think back to the night Barack Obama was elected president. So many of us were jubilant. Even I, who once hoped to beat him, was ecstatic,” Clinton said Sunday on Yale’s campus. “It was such a hopeful moment. And yet in some ways, this moment feels even more hopeful. Because this is a battle-hardened hope, tempered by loss and clear-eyed about the stakes.”
Clinton, the former secretary of state and the first woman to run for president with a major party’s nomination, delivered those remarks Sunday afternoon in a lively commencement address before Yale’s graduating seniors and just a handful of parents who made it inside Woolsey Hall.
To a generation that one student said was defined “by Fannie Mae, Facebook, and Ferguson,” Clinton issued a call for youth to reshape the world the way they’d like to see it. In the same way students already changed Yale’s campus with the renaming of Calhoun College, she told them to keep fighting for policies that treat everyone with dignity.
“We’re living through a time when fundamental rights, civic virtue, freedom of the press, even facts and reason are under assault like never before. But we are also witnessing an era of new moral conviction, civic engagement and a sense of devotion to our democracy and country,” she said. “If any group were ever prepared to rise to the occasion, it is you.”
Christopher Peak Photo
Undergrads crowded into Woolsey Hall for Clinton’s speech.
Amid a debate about her place in public life (with some male critics telling her to “go away already”), Clinton’s speech indicated that she has no plans to disengage from the work of inspiring the next generation.
In the 25-minute speech, she referenced statesmen and scholars, recounted her college days, shared her regrets, and laughed.
Following an age-old tradition, the students sported over-the-top hats. Amid the baseball caps and royal crowns, a few wore pink “pussy” hats from the Women’s March on Washington. On stage, someone even managed to attach a Clinton campaign sign to their head. Clinton herself joined in the fun, pulling out a Russian fur cap.
“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” she said.
Reflecting on resilience, Clinton said she still hadn’t gotten over her devastating loss to Donald Trump in 2016, even after hikes in the woods, yoga and a more than a few bottles of Chardonnay. But she said she’d deal. She was more worried about whether the nation’s institutions would survive.
“Today, as a person, I’m okay, but as an American, I’m concerned,” she said. “Right now, we’re living through a full-fledged crisis in our democracy. Now, there are not tanks in the streets, but what’s happening right now goes to the heart of who we are as a nation. And I say this, not as a Democrat who lost an election but as an American afraid of losing a country.”
But Clinton ended the speech on an optimistic note, recalling another commencement address Clinton gave a half-century ago — that one, to her fellow graduates at Wellesley College in 1969, as gays rioted at the Stonewall Inn and Nixon shipped troops to Vietnam. During both turbulent moments in American history, Clinton urged wide-eyed idealists to remain undiscouraged.
“Yes, these are challenging times for America, but we’ve come through challenging times before,” she said.
“How do we build democratic resilience?” Clinton asked. Advocate for college accessibility, subscribe to a newspaper, vote and use “radical empathy” to look past divisions of race, class, religion, and politics, she suggested. “We can’t just ask, ‘Am I better off than I was four years ago?’ We have to ask, ‘Are we all better off?’ Are we, as a country, stronger, better and fairer?”
Clinton urged the students to continue standing up for immigrant rights, racial justice, and gun control.
“The fact that some days it is really hard to keep at it, just makes it that much more remarkable that so many of us are, in fact, keeping at it,” she said. “It’s not easy to wade back into the fight every day, but we’re doing it. And that’s why I’m optimistic, because of how unbelievably tough Americans are proving to be.”
And when hope fails, blame others, promote fake investigations, blame sexism and don't forget to scrub your computer, delete correspondence, lie and obfuscate.