Donald Trump responds to Clinton speech with Twitter salvo

The air in the convention hall was thick with anticipation, and women delegates and party members smiled exuberantly.

“He wants us to fear the future and fear each other”.

For me, a feminist of the Baby Boom generation, the evening was by turns a climactic moment and a denouement.

Turning to national security, Clinton warned that a president has to make decisions about war and peace, life and death.

Vying to be the first woman elected US president, Clinton called her nomination “a milestone”.

“I believe that when we have millions of hardworking immigrants contributing to our economy, it would be self-defeating and inhumane to kick them out”, she said thus vehemently opposing the move of the rival Donald Trump campaign to deport illegal immigrants. “I’m not telling you that everything is peachy keen – I’m telling you we’ve made progress, but we have work to do”.

Compassion is a laudable quality in any leader.

Clinton repeated the convention’s theme of “stronger together”, declaring that her lifelong goal has been to ensure that Americans can use their talent and ambition to strengthen the nation. While Clinton and Obama have argued that ISIS is on the run, the economy is on the upswing, and Americans are safer than they have been in years, they are struggling to counter the dark image that Trump has painted of a nation in decline, chaos and disorder that resonates with many voters. “She tweeted:”#crookedHillary doesn’t understand that there is only ONE President not a village of Presidents. She talked about her family and the lessons she learned from her parents while growing up.

His campaign dismissed her convention speech as “an insulting collection of cliches and recycled rhetoric”, that was “delivered from a fantasy universe, not the reality we live in today”. A woman who was wounded in the 911 terrorist attacks. Doctors and nurses who care for us?

Following a spate of killings by police of African-American youths and massacres of police officers, Clinton laid out a firm stance on gun control, vowing that America should not have a president in the “pocket” of the gun lobby.

The speech capped a four-day nominating convention that opened in discord after a leak of hacked Democratic National Committee emails showed party officials favored Clinton over primary rival Bernie Sanders, a USA senator from Vermont.

Donald Trump’s running mate Mike Pence told radio host Hugh Hewitt on Friday that would never happen to the GOP nominee’s audience. “And if you give me the chance, that’s what I’ll do as President”, Ms Clinton said.

She acknowledged some people still do not know her well.

The junior Trump took to Twitter to make the claim about the similarities. “Well, he could start by actually making things in America again”.

Her critique of Trump’s temperament was a clever turn of the gender tables, attributing to her male opponent the sort of character weakness sexists often attribute to women. “Donald Trump can’t even handle the rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign”, Clinton said. “He loses his cool at the slightest provocation-when he’s gotten a tough question from a reporter, when he’s challenged in a debate, when he sees a protester at a rally”.

“Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis”, she said. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons”. “But you know what?” Her mother-a motherly mother, a womanly woman who looms large in Clinton’s autobiography.

She and Trump are not that far apart in the polls, and Clinton has little room for error as she tries to appeal to those who don’t like her, and to independent and even Republican voters who may be willing to vote for her.

Her speech lacked the poetic sweep of the President Barack Obama’s address Wednesday, but it was in keeping with someone who presents herself as a practical, dogged, policy-oriented striver who gets knocked down and then gets straight back up.