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The line of rally-goers stretched a third of a mile from the Skibo Gym all the way to Forbes Avenue on the Carnegie Mellon University campus. Students, retirees and the like were all waiting for their chance to see Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at her first stump speech in the Steel City.

By the time Clinton arrived at about 6:40 p.m., the crowd of 2,000 inside the old gymnasium had waited about two hours, but campaign representatives said that she was late because she stopped to talk to more than 1,000 people who were outside the gym and were turned away from participating in the rally inside. The crowd was made up of mostly young people (keep in mind this event was held on a college campus) along with a good number of seniors.

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When Clinton finally arrived, the crowd erupted into cheers, and she was introduced by Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald and Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto. (In fact the rally ended up including a who’s who in local Democratic politics: Pittsburgh City Councilors Dan Gilman and Natalia Rudiak, council president Bruce Kraus, Beaver and Westmoreland county commissioners, and Heather Arnet of the Women and Girls Foundation, who recently unsuccessfully ran for a Pa. State Senate seat, came with her young son.)

“Other candidates want to build walls,” said Fitzgerald to the crowd alluding to presidential candidate and Republican front runner Donald Trump (check out next week’s City Paper Election Issue for coverage on Trump and other statewide elections). “But Pittsburgh is the City of Bridges, and Secretary Clinton is someone who builds bridges.”

When Clinton took the stage, she said she was “thrilled” to be in Pittsburgh and gave a nod to the city and how it is rebounding from the city’s recession in the 1980s.

“Pittsburgh is demonstrating resiliency, and its residents now believe they can make it in Western Pa.,” said Clinton.

Her speech focused on her experience in the U.S. Senate and her time working with President Barack Obama in the White House. She outlined plans to tackle the country’s infrastructure problems and said she would create a national infrastructure bank that would supply funds to repair the country’s crumbling roads and bridges.

Clinton also said, if elected, she would work to invest $10 billion to create manufacturing jobs. She also said there are economic opportunities in fighting climate change and pledged to install 500 million more solar panels in the U.S. by the end of her first term.

When discussing climate change, Clinton took some jabs at the Republican Party establishment who tend to deny climate change with the defense that “they are not scientists.”

“Well I bet Carnegie Mellon could help teach them about science,” she said.

She also lobbed some subtle insults towards her Democratic primary opponent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. She says she was thrilled when 195 countries signed the Paris Climate Summit agreement and decried Sanders for saying it did not go far enough in its regulations. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good,” she said to the crowd.

Clinton also shared her plans to address the ballooning student debt problem. She said that students should first be allowed to refinance their loans, and that after 20 years of payments, the debt should be wiped out. She also pledged to end of the practice of the government making a profit off student loans, to a large applause.

But the biggest applause of the evening came when Clinton shouted with enthusiasm “imagine that women get equal pay for the work we do.”

After the speech, Clinton circled the stage to take selfies and shake hands with hundreds of supporters. One college-age woman looked gleefully delighted after shaking Clinton’s hand, screaming to her friend how excited she was.

This article appears in Apr 6-12, 2016.

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7 replies on “Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton visits Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University rally”

  1. Her pro-fracking history will come back to haunt her, especially when all the record breaking weather we’ve been having gets worse.

  3. Go Carnegie Mellon! So happy to see young men and women politically active and involved. What a great audience for Hillary.

  4. why on earth would anyone loath bernie? he’s so delicately putting it that hillbillary cant even put national security above her 2016 presidential bid. google “guccifer” hillary, for fact, was the white house leak from obama’s first term. why didn’t she government wipe her server? was she just too dumb or didn’t she want to have to ask obama for a pardon? since she didn’t wipe it only “deleted” it, they can’t say guccifer faked intel and made it look like something from her server. that stuff is highly damaging to america’s national security. why she’s even allowed to run could only be so she can be a dead duck in the water for whoever wins the republican nomination.

    hillbillary supporters, you might hate bernie for frivolous reasons, be he’s your only hope.

    hillbillary is either criminally negligent or competently criminal. either the leaks are the fkup they look like or she was selling top level state department transmissions by transmitting classified communications over unsecured networks. which is it? criminal negligence of competent criminality.

  5. Super-PACs MUST be banned! They give a few wealthy exploiters the ability to shape our entire political system; they allow for absurdly unequal representation! The people and corporations funding these PACs have acquired their wealth from selling out America through political favors, endless wars, unfair trade deals, exploiting foreign labor, exploiting illegal labor within our borders, creating insurmountable debt for our children, and maintaining a rigged election process that ensures nothing will change. Super-PACs are a direct conflict of interest and an absolute corrupting force!

    In my opinion, any candidate who doesn’t demand their super-PACs disband in the name of democracy and the people is a flat out TRAITOR to America! Exploiter puppets Clinton and Cruz will never do this like Trump and Sanders have; instead, they will continue feigning powerlessness and ignorance regarding super-PACs. Anyone who votes for these conniving two-faced lawyers is voting to continue selling out America!

    If someone with Trump’s resources can’t run without being shredded by exploiter-funded super-PACs and media pundits, how does someone like me or you have a chance? The answer is that, unless we are lackeys like Clinton and Cruz, whom those same exploiters also fund, we don’t! The process is rigged; you can watch a great example of how the media takes things out of context and falsely demonizes non-controlled candidates like Trump by searching for and viewing “The Untruth about Donald Trump” video.

  6. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that a global free-trade market means that workers making $25/hr will have to compete with workers making $1/hr. An equilibrium must ultimately be achieved just like in any system and, in this case, that essentially means that American workers will be working for no more than the minimum wage set by law when all is said and done. Unfortunately, countries without minimum wage laws will still offer lower labor costs than us, which means that those minimum wage jobs won’t even be available here in the US when the dust finally settles from this. Anyone who says anything else concerning free-trade is either lying through their teeth, or is a completely clueless idiot. “Free-trade” comes at a huge cost to workers in developed countries.

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