"People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here's the painful part: they're right. The system is rigged," she said. "Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Wall Street CEOs -- the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs -- still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them. Anyone here have a problem with that? Well I do."

Proving the advantage of having your party's convention come second, she responded directly to the theme of success laid out again and again in Tampa.

"These folks don't resent that someone else makes more money. We're Americans. We celebrate success," she said. However, she continued in her folksy way: "We just don't want the game to be rigged."

And she echoed what's clearly a theme of this convention as much as the invocation of "forward": the idea that this race is about who we are in America, and that our very identity is at stake in it.

Thanks to progressives, "We started to take children out of factories and put them in schools. We began to give meaning to the words 'consumer protection' by making our food and medicine safe. And we gave the little guys a better chance to compete by preventing the big guys from rigging the markets. We turned adversity into progress because that's what we do."

It was a speech that worked well on a night that, before Bill Clinton, was a bit of a snooze. But it turns out that Clinton isn't just a tough act to follow -- he's a tough act to share any part of an evening with, so thoroughly does he dominate the stage.

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