Hillary Clinton rallied Democrats in New York City on Thursday for Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is locked in a tighter-than-expected race with Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin as she runs for a first full term.
“This election, like every election is a choice. It’s not just a choice between two candidates, it is a choice between two very different ideas about who we are as a state and a country,” Clinton said.
Clinton, the first woman elected statewide in New York during her 2000 Senate run, made the case for Hochul, the state’s first female governor while hammering Zeldin over his votes in the House against the Violence Against Women Act, equal pay, raising the minimum wage and Medicare funding.
But Clinton’s speech offered a broader criticism of the Republican Party, especially on their messaging on crime — using the recent attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, as her case-in-point.
“I want everybody to be safe. Honestly, who’s against that? But then a terrible crime happens in San Francisco. An intruder hits an 82-year-old man in the head with a hammer, who happens to be married to the speaker of the house, and Republicans joke about it. The woman running for governor in Arizona jokes about it. Now why would any sensible person want to give power to somebody who thinks it’s funny that someone gets assaulted in his own home,” Clinton said, referring to Arizona’s GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake.
“They don’t care about keeping you safe, they want to keep you scared,” Clinton added.
Like Hochul, whom she introduced, and the speakers before her, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Clinton put a particular focus on Republican efforts to roll back abortion rights and other progressive advances from the past half-century.
“If you paid attention to this campaign, then Republicans make no secret about what they want to do. They actually say the quiet part out loud. Lee Zeldin, Kathy’s opponent, along with Donald Trump and their allies are literally fighting tooth and nail to turn back the clock,” Clinton said.
“Think about it, yes, of course, they want to turn back the clock on abortion. They spent 50 years trying to make that happen. But they want to turn back the clock on women’s rights in general, on civil rights, on voting rights, on gay rights. They are determined to exercise control over who we are, how we feel and believe and act in ways that I thought we had long left behind,” she added.
