Kentucky’s secretary of state tells DNC delegates that Hillary Clinton is her mentor and intimate friend.
“I have known Hillary Clinton for most of my life,” Alison Lundergan Grimes says. She lost to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky) in a hotly contested 2014 campaign. “The Hillary I know is caring and compassionate. She reminds me to slow down and spend time with my family.”
After more that 75 other speakers, she was the first one of speak about the presumed Democratic nominee for president as a close friend. Grimes talked about a woman that she interacted with as a fellow human, not the political ally or champion of causes everyone else seems to know her as. Clinton is a figure in American life, whose every move is calculated for political effect and who might have stayed with her cheating husband, President William J. Clinton, because she was concerned about the effect of a presidential divorce on seats on the Supreme Court.
The loyalty to Grimes showed to Clinton was unusual for a secretary of state, since that office oversees elections and primaries, but she did not hold back. In fact, speaking to Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s “Hardball” program, Grimes said, “There is no revolution that’s occurring for Senator Sanders here in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. He didn’t get the big night that he needed.”
It was not close, she said.
“I think the main story tonight, Senator Sanders needed a big win here in the Commonwealth and that just hasn’t happened,” she said.
Grimes, the daughter of Gerald G. “Jerry” Lundergan, who was chairman of her state’s Democratic Party in the 1980s, said she met Clinton in January 1993 at the Lincoln Memorial with her four sisters and in the years that followed Clinton took an extraordinary in her life. When they met, Grimes was only 14-years-old.
“I could have never imagined that years later, she would write, call, check up on me at law school, help me out with my first campaign for secretary of state and stand by me as I took on one of the nation’s biggest bullies (wait for it) Mitch McConnell,” she said. “For me this is personal. She was the first to call me when both my grandparents passed.”
Interestingly, even when she talks about the top Republican in the Senate, she does not talk about his politics or policies. Rather, it was her and Clinton, two women standing up together against a mean man.
Grimes gave witness to Hillary Clinton, her friend, and described a woman might even like if they got to know her.
“More than anything else, she loves to listen.”