Clinton Claims Democratic Nomination, Scores More Primary Victories

Hillary Clinton's career has been a series of firsts: first student to give a speech at commencement at Wellesley College. First lady. First female senator from New York.

Now, she has claimed an iconic distinction further cemented by Tuesday's multiple primary wins: the first woman to secure a major party's nomination for president.

Addressing a massive, cheering crowd at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Tuesday night, Clinton looked both energized and relieved, digesting the reality of accomplishing what she had failed to do eight years ago, and what no woman in U.S. history has ever done before.

"Thanks to you, we've reached a milestone," Clinton said, stopping her remarks when screams of joy from the crowd made it impossible for her to be heard.

"Tonight's victory is not about one person. It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible," she added.

Clinton's victory speech came after her campaign showed a video of people throughout history marching for women's rights, and served as the capstone, live event following more than a century and a half of struggle.

"It's just fabulous. I've been tearing up all day," says Ellen Malcolm, founder of EMILY's List, which seeks to elect female, pro-abortion rights Democrats to office. When the group was created in 1985, "people would ask me when we were going to elect the first female president, and I would just scratch my head. The whole idea was inconceivable," she says.

But after helping to put scores of women in the House, Senate and governor's mansions, Malcolm believes she will see that goal accomplished.

After a grueling and unexpectedly protracted primary battle, Clinton had -- with pledges of support from so-called superdelegates -- racked up the 2,383 delegates necessary to claim the nomination on Monday, The Associated Press reported, citing its own tallies. But four more wins -- in California, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota -- in a six-state series of contests on Tuesday more clearly underscored Clinton's role as presumptive nominee.

"It's completely historic," says Jennifer Lawless, director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University. And despite the setbacks Clinton has faced and the potential for continued opposition from Sen. Bernie Sanders, "it's important not to underestimate what she's accomplished."

Lawless considers this Clinton moment "the most significant" for women in politics in her own lifetime. "She's cracked one glass ceiling and is on her way to cracking a second," she says.

Clinton now shifts more fully into general election mode, a transition she already started with a blistering foreign policy speech last week in which she slammed presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump as not just crude, but dangerous to American national security.

Meanwhile, she must still deal with the delicate matter of how to handle Sanders, a democratic socialist who won Tuesday's contests in Montana and North Dakota and has mounted a stunningly strong challenge for the nomination. While Sanders was not a fixture in Democratic politics and fundraising -- indeed, he only joined the party when he decided to seek its presidential nomination -- his message against Wall Street and income inequality played well with a party that has been moving to the left.

Clinton had kind words at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for Sanders, whom she credited with conducting a debate that made both the country and the Democratic Party better. She was unabashedly harsh on Trump, calling him "temperamentally unfit to be president" and saying his signature campaign line -- "make America great again" -- is in fact "code for 'let's take America backwards.'"

Savoring the moment, Clinton lamented only that her mother, Dorothy Rodham, was not there to see her mark it. But Clinton, who has spoken often of the influence her mother had on her, said Rodham "taught me never to back down from a bully" -- a clear reference to Trump.

For his part, Sanders has declared an intention to stay in the race until the July convention, on the theory that he could convince enough superdelegates -- party bigwigs and elected officials who don't vote until the actual convention -- to switch their allegiances from Clinton. That appears highly unlikely, especially since Sanders has criticized the very existence of the superdelegates as undemocratic and a tool of the establishment.

Yet on Tuesday in California, he gave a rousing late-night speech in which he thanked his supporters, castigated Trump and pledged to "continue the fight" through next week's Democratic primary in the District of Columbia.

"Thank you all," he told a boisterous crowd of supporters. "The struggle continues."

Still, for the Clinton campaign, Tuesday night was about celebration -- not just for Clinton, but for those who have watched her break barriers for female candidates and women in general.

"This is so historic," says an ebullient Alan Schechter, emeritus professor at Wellesley College and Clinton's senior thesis adviser. "I was thinking -- it took 70 years from the first women's rights convention in 1848 to pass the right to vote [for women] and then 45 more years to pass the first law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender. Now, we may be electing the first female president."

"The process has been very long, very slow and complex. It's just so hard to change our culture," adds Schechter, who remains personal friends with Clinton.

Clinton, Schechter recalls, did not want to bring about change in elected office, thinking she would instead advocate for her causes outside that arena. But when New York Democrats asked the then-first lady to run for the Senate, she decided to do so, thinking her voice would have more authority if she were a senator and not just the wife of a former president, Schechter says, remembering a dinner conversation he had with the Clintons at the White House in 1999.

Clinton assiduously avoided making her gender an issue in her unsuccessful 2008 bid for the nomination, instead casting herself as the more experienced contender, someone better able to handle the "3 a.m. call" of a national security emergency. But this year, Clinton spoke more openly about matters such as equal pay, reproductive rights and paid family leave -- issues aimed at female voters.

Her gender is an unavoidable factor in her general election campaign. But because she has such a long history, for better or for worse, in public life -- from "Hillarycare" in the early 1990s to her posts in the Senate and at the State Department -- voters will be evaluating a more nuanced figure, says Michele Swers, an American government professor at Georgetown University and author of "Women in the Club: Gender and Policy Making in the Senate."

"She has a lot of roles in the public mind, from senator to secretary of state. Those roles, and the thoughts you have about the images of the Clintons and where they stand in politics -- maybe that does set the [gender] narrative aside a little bit," Swers says.

There has been a gender gap in presidential elections since 1980, with women tending to vote for the Democrat and men for the Republican. Clinton must still, however, win over the support of millennial women who were backing Sanders.

Malcolm says she can do that.

"I talk to millennial women and they tell me their mothers told them they could be whatever they wanted," Malcolm says. "Until tonight, you couldn't be a nominee for a major party for president. They may not realize it, but my guess is, if and when she's sworn in as president, they're going to feel a little taller."

Susan Milligan is a political and foreign affairs writer and contributed to a biography of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, "Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy." Follow her on Twitter: @MilliganSusan