Clinton struggles for unity
The Democratic Party kicked off its national convention yesterday to anoint Hillary Clinton its presidential nominee, as a row over leaked emails showing party leaders sought to undermine campaign rival Bernie Sanders threatened to upstage the gathering.
Sanders lost the primary race but he has endorsed his bitter rival, and in a show of unity he has been offered a prime speaking slot on day one of the four-day confab.
Sanders will stress that the party mission is to elect Clinton in November and prevent Republican Donald Trump from becoming the 45th president of the United States.
The brash billionaire, who was formally nominated the Republican Party's flagbearer in Cleveland last week, topped Clinton 48 to 45 percent in a two-way matchup CNN poll out yesterday. The figure represents a drastic six-point convention bounce.
While the former secretary of state is set to make history as the first female flagbearer of any major American political party, the process has fallen under a cloud that Trump has been all too eager to exploit.
Anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks at the weekend released nearly 20,000 emails from between January 2015 and May 2016, gleaned by hackers who apparently raided the accounts of seven Democratic National Committee leaders.
At least two of the messages showed senior committee members were keen to undermine the Sanders campaign by seeking to raise questions about Sanders's faith and heritage.
Amid efforts to draw a line under the damage that threatened to revive tensions with Sanders followers, the Democratic Party's chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz abruptly announced her resignation, effective at the end of the convention.
After a hard-fought primary campaign, the party had been heading to the convention seeming far more unified than the Republicans, whose fissures were laid bare in Cleveland last week.
Now the Democrats are struggling with the fallout from a scandal that threatened to mushroom into a major crisis just as the party was supposed to coalesce around its nominee.
"The Democrats are in a total meltdown," Trump taunted on Twitter. "E-mails say the rigged system is alive & well!"
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