2008 in Review - The Parting Shot (June)

By June, we were all exhausted by the Bataan Death March that was the Democratic nomination process.  The end of the Clinton dynasty couldn't come fast enough for some people.

The drumbeat began long before the final votes on Tuesday, June 3.  In March, when the delegate math made it clear that Hillary Clinton could not win the nomination by delegates awarded in the primary season, calls began for her to step aside, for the good of the party.

Throughout the Spring, the drum rolled.  It was accepted as fact that continuing this primary campaign was harming the Democrat’s chances for victory in November.  Despite the fact that record numbers of voters were turning out to cast votes, despite the fact that John McCain’s spent the Spring taking a victory lap - courting disaffected conservatives and having a shakeout of staffers, despite the daily attention to the Democratic candidates and thus Democratic issues, the drumming continued.  A lengthy primary was bad for the party and somebody - meaning Hillary - should quit.

Finally, we reached June and the end of the long march.  Barack Obama’s inevitable victory became his actual victory in the delegate count.  And with that came the last shots taken at Hillary Clinton’s Energizer Bunny campaign.  Early Tuesday, the voices started clamoring that Hillary owed it to the party, owed it to Obama, to make a concession speech and get off the stage.  As the week wore on, the drum rolled again - her delay between Tuesday’s vote totals and Saturday’s withdrawal speech were harming the party.  

This is nonsense.  What mattered was not when Hillary quit once the result was known, but how she did it.  And she did it right.

The noise-makers calling for a concession speech on Tuesday were simply wrong.  After 17 months of running for the Democratic nomination, wasn’t Hillary entitled to a day to digest the disappointment and gather her thoughts and her emotions?  And is it only me, or did the clamor about her failure to graciously accept her defeat seemed tinged with a little too much glee?

Part of this is our current American cultural desire for clean breaks and clear decisions.  Too much is expected to be black-and-white, cut-and-dried.  As the media culled the punditry and politicos for sound-bites about how Hillary could dare to offend Obama by hanging around on Wednesday and Thursday, you could almost hear a clipped British accent saying “You are the weakest link, good-bye.”

All the clamor for a quick exit missed the real point.  This primary season came to a close with Hillary winning 9 of the last 16 contests and some by whopping margins.  The Democratic party was threatening to splinter by the end, with the rancorous Rules Committee meeting over the Florida and Michigan delegations, and far too many voters were saying they weren’t sure they would vote for Obama in November.  With the nomination ultimately in the hands of the “superdelegates,” she should have spent the week calling each and every one and asking “are you sure?”  

Analysis in the final weeks also picked up a theme of disappointed, and potentially disaffected, women voters, who felt that sexism played a little too large a role in Hillary’s demise.  There may be some truth to that charge, but true or not, it had the potential to create a split in the party and again was heard the sentiment that some of those voters might stay home or vote for John McCain in November.

Hillary Clinton was the first choice of half of the people who took the time to go to the polls and vote in a Democratic primary.  She clearly had the ability to cripple Obama’s candidacy, by signaling that voters should not accept Obama as the legitimate Democratic nominee, setting up a shadow third-party - Hillary supporters unwilling to support Obama.  Some pundits proposed that she may have spent the week doing just that.

But on Saturday afternoon in Washington, Clinton put all that to rest.  Her concession speech said eveything which Barack Obama could hope to hear.  The only way she could have been more clear was to have said “To everyone who is thinking about  withholding your vote from Barack Obama, I will personally beat you with a baseball bat if you do.”

In some ways, this speech showed again why so many people were eager to vote for Hillary Clinton.  She touched on the main themes of her campaign as the main themes of the Democratic party, in the kind of forceful language that left us wondering where such eloquence had been in January and February when she needed it.  She made the case for electing Barack Obama in November as gleefully as she had made the case for herself, and she pledged to do everything she can do to make it happen.

The Hillary-haters, and there are many, will continue to look for the hidden agenda.  Rumors of her lust for the vice-presidency abound, and may be true.  But Clinton did not spend the week negotiating conditions for her withdrawal from the race, as so many speculated.  She spent the week getting used to the idea that she was not going to be president, and then crafting a speech which would eradicate the doubts about her loyalty to the party.  

The final weeks of the campaign highlighted how tenuous Barack Obama’s grip on the electorate is.  The voters of West Virginia, for instance, have serious problems with his message, and possibly with his race, and turned out in droves for Clinton.  But their willingness to vote for a Democratic candidate at all is a hopeful sign for the election in November, if Hillary Clinton matches her rhetoric with muscle in the coming months.