Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton grew emotional as she read a portion of her planned 2016 victory speech as part of a new talk on the power of resilience.
“In this lesson, I’m going to face one of my most public defeats head-on by sharing with you the speech I had hoped to deliver if I had won the 2016 election,” the former secretary of state said in an excerpt of her upcoming MasterClass lesson shared with TODAY.
“I’ve never shared this with anybody. I’ve never read this out loud. But it helps to encapsulate who I am, what I believe in, and what my hopes were for the kind of country that I want for my grandchildren, and that I want for the world, that I believe in that is America at its best,” Clinton said.
Clinton said the speech would have been given on election night in 2016 if she had won and not lost to former President Donald Trump. In the speech, she speaks of how democracy in the U.S. is strong, noting that voters rose to the challenge of choosing “unity” and “decency.”
Clinton would have also addressed becoming the first female president and its significance to the country. She argued in the speech that her victory would have changed the “face” of American democracy forever.
“I’ve met little boys and girls who didn’t understand why a woman has never been president before,” she said. “This is a victory for all Americans. Men and women. Boys and girls. Because as our country has proven once again, when there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit.”
In the video, Clinton becomes visibly emotional as she starts to talk about her mother, who faced enormous hardships growing up and died in 2011.
“You may have heard me talk about her difficult childhood. She was abandoned by her parents when she was just 8 years old,” she said. “They put her on a train to California where she was mistreated by her parents and ended up out on her own, working as a housemaid.”
“Sometimes I think about her on that train,” Clinton said. “I dream of going up to her, and sitting down next to her, taking her into my arms, and saying, ‘Look at me. Listen to me. You will survive. You will have a good family of your own. And three children. And as hard as it might be to imagine, your daughter will grow up and become the president of the United States.”
Clinton’s Masterclass will be released on Sunday, TODAY noted. Former President George W. Bush and former first lady Laura Bush will also be featured in a video about lessons in principled decision-making next year.
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