LOS ANGELES — Eight years after conceding she was unable to “shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling,” Hillary Clinton is embracing her place in history as she finally crashes through as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
Throughout her surprisingly rocky primary campaign, Clinton has been cautious about emphasizing her trailblazer status. But as she campaigned in California in recent days, the former secretary of state signaled she was ready to acknowledge her distinction as the first woman to top the presidential ticket of a major US political party.
The Associated Press
determined Monday that Clinton had reached the 2,383 delegates needed to become the presumptive Democratic nominee.
The former secretary of state told a rally in Long Beach, California, that “according to the news, we are on the brink of a historic, historic, unprecedented moment.”
“But we still have work to do, don’t we?”
she said, referring to Tuesday’s primaries in California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
The capital Washington rounds out the nominating contests when it votes on June 14.
Clinton has mounted a hectic 48-hour campaign push ahead of California’s high-profile primary, hoping to finish strong and end any argument for Vermong Senator Bernie Sanders to remain in the race, as he has pledged to do until the Democratic convention.
“It’s not over until it’s over,” the former secretary of state told reporters at a community center in Compton, near Los Angeles.
Clinton came to the brink of the nomination Sunday when she won the US territory of Puerto Rico, pushing her delegate count to 2,373, according to a CNN tally.
She reportedly surpassed the threshold Monday after a number of super-delegates — current and former elected officials and political activists who are not bound to vote for a specific candidate — committed to back her candidacy.
The Sanders campaign called it “a rush to judgment.”
“Secretary Clinton does not have and will not have the requisite number of pledged delegates to secure the nomination,” Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs said in a statement.
She will be dependent on super-delegates “who do not vote until July 25 and who can change their minds between now and then.”
Clinton noted Monday that she has earned three million votes more than Sanders and is well ahead in the pledged delegate count.
Clinton vowed Monday to “do everything I can to unify the Democratic Party,” saying she would be reaching out to Sanders.
“And I hope he’ll join me in that. We have to be unified going into and out of the convention to take on Donald Trump and to repudiate the kind of campaign he’s running.”
Smashing ‘the highest and hardest glass ceiling’
The seeming clinching of the nomination is a remarkable moment for a candidate who’s spent much of her life at the center of a heated national conversation about the role of women. From stridently defending her own career, famously saying in 1992 that she never “stayed home and baked cookies,” to a 2008 presidential bid that shied away from mentioning her gender, Clinton has addressed the issue of her historic role from nearly every angle.
Now she’s trying something new: owning it.
“Starting next Tuesday we’re on our way to breaking the highest and hardest glass ceiling,” Clinton said last week in Culver City, echoing the speech she made in 2008 when she conceded the Democratic primary to Barack Obama.
Her supporters are already there: At events in California, they chanted “deal me in” when she joked about “playing the woman card.”
“Having a woman president will make a great statement, a historic statement about what kind of country we are, about what we stand for,” Clinton told reporters at a community center in Compton Monday. “It’s really emotional and I am someone who has been very touched and really encouraged by this extraordinary conviction people have.”
Campaign aides say Clinton is mindful of the significance, especially when she thinks about her mother, Dorothy Rodham, who was born before women had the right to vote. Rodham, who died in 2011, was in attendance at Clinton’s concession speech in 2008 and Clinton has made her life story a focal point of the campaign.
That’s a reversal from her first presidential bid. In 2008, Clinton believed she needed to project an image of strength to persuade voters she could be the first woman to serve as commander in chief — a “kind of tough single parent” rather than a “first mama,” as Mark Penn, her chief strategist at the time, described it.
Aides and allies believe that her previous presidential run helped normalize the idea of a woman in the country’s highest position,
This year, Clinton wants to focus on how her groundbreaking achievement is symbolic of the kind of change she wants to effect as president, aides say. “Breaking down barriers” has been one of her campaign slogans, as she pledges to improve access to education, jobs and opportunity.
After a challenging primary against Sanders’ insurgent campaign, Clinton feels confident about the contrast this message offers with likely Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has made disparaging comments about women. In recent days, Clinton has drawn wild applause for a newly aggressive line of attack against Trump.
Her campaign thinks she can use Trump’s incendiary rhetoric against him, particularly to win over white, suburban women — a demographic Obama lost.
But that remains to be seen. Trump has shown himself willing to go after her with gender-related attacks, accusing her of “shouting” and of playing the “woman’s card” to get ahead. He has also sniped at her marriage to Bill Clinton as well as his personal indiscretions.
The unpredictability concerns some of Clinton’s strongest allies.
“There’s still a huge difference between the way in which female and males either running for or being in executive positions are treated,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “Because we have not had a female executive as president of the United States, we have no idea how all of this is going to play out.”
When she started her campaign, Clinton frequently joked about being the
“youngest woman president.”
But in recent months she had largely stopped mentioning her place in history because her campaign found it was not effective with voters. That’s started to change.
All along, Clinton has heavily emphasized issues of importance to women, like paid family leave, equal pay and affordable child care. In California, she was joined by 17 female leaders and celebrities, including Sally Field, Mary Steenburgen and Debra Messing.
Field drew huge applause as she asked why Clinton gets accused of not being likable.
“What is this, a high school popularity contest? She’s not running to be anybody’s friend. She’s running to be the president of the United States,” Field said.
In this context 'bad' would be understood as awful or sad. 
