Democrats gather for Clinton nomination

PHILADELPHIA

US Democrats converge on the City of Brotherly Love to elevate Hillary Clinton this coming week as the party’s nominee who will battle Republican Donald Trump in 2016’s presidential election.

The Democratic National Convention kicks off on Monday in Philadelphia with the party more unified than the Republicans, whose fissures were laid bare this week as they confirmed brash billionaire Trump as their flag-bearer.

But frustrations are nevertheless swirling as delegates bicker about the Democratic nominating process and new hiccups over Clinton camp emails.
“Next week in Philadelphia we will offer a very different vision for our country,” she pledged. “One that is about building bridges, not walls, embracing the diversity that makes our country great.”

Her quest received a boost Saturday when she introduced Tim Kaine of Virginia as her running mate, a savvy Spanish-speaking US senator with a bright smile but “a backbone of steel”, according to Clinton.

Kaine “is everything Donald Trump and (Republican running-mate) Mike Pence are not,” she said.

The 58-year-old Kaine, from a crucial battleground state, delivered a rousing speech in Miami, Florida, laying out sharp contrasts between Clinton and the Republican nominee.

ENEMIES DROOLING

“She doesn’t insult people, she listens to them,” he told the Miami crowd. “She doesn’t trash our allies, she respects them. And she’ll always have our backs.”

Following the appearance Trump tweeted that he had seen “Crooked Hillary and Tim Kaine together. ISIS and our other enemies are drooling. They don’t look presidential to me!”

The Democratic convention “gavels in” at 4 pm on Monday in Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Centre, with First Lady Michelle Obama and Clinton’s former rival in the primaries, Senator Bernie Sanders, scheduled as the headliners.

Former president Bill Clinton is the star on Tuesday, while President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden take the stage Wednesday.

The Democrats have considerably more star-power than the Republicans who gathered in Cleveland, where both former Bush presidents steered clear, as did former Republican presidential nominees John McCain (2008) and Mitt Romney (2012).

Even as the party basked in the lovefest that was the first Clinton-Kaine rally, there was still a whiff of scandal that could rattle party unity.

A cache of leaked emails from Democratic Party leaders’ accounts includes at least two messages suggesting an insider effort to hobble the upstart Sanders campaign — including by seeking to present him as an atheist to undermine him in religious states.