Senator Barack Obma is officially the nominee of the Democratic Party for the presidential election of November 2008. Whether you are black, white or brown, a man or a woman, a Democrat, Republican, Independent or politically indifferent and whatever happens in November, you must acknowledge the historic nature of this nomination.
Why then are the Democrats not celebrating like giddy teenagers at a prom party? They are subdued and cautious because Hillary Clinton refuses to exit the stage gracefully even when it is amply clear that she has lost the contest. Earlier in the day when the numbers showed that Obama would become the nominee by the end of the evening, she and her supporters floated the idea of her "willingness" to be on the ticket as the vice presidential candidate. It was seen clearly by all as a pressure tactic to force Obama’s hands. (I hope he has the intestinal fortitude to say "no." It is going to be horribly injurious to Obama to have the Clintons trail his shadow) After the last primary results were in and the delegate count went clearly in his favor, Obama gave a speech in Minnesota that was inspirational, substantive, gracious, forward looking and confident. In any other circumstances, Democrats should have been ecstasic. But most of us only feel somewhat relieved and our continued anxiety about a fractured party was reinforced by HRC’s astonishingly self-serving, tone deaf and defiant performance.
Hillary informed us that she had not decided what she would do next and made it abundantly clear that the 18 million votes she got were a substantial bargaining chip in her bag with which to twist Obama’s and the DNC’s arms. She also continued to claim (falsely) that she has won the popular vote, pretending for all purposes, that she is the "real" nominee. With her dogged denial of reality, Hillary lost the opportunity of being conciliatory and gracious at her own going-away party and history will record that churlishness along with all the other callous missteps that she, her husband and her campaign have made in their quest for the grand prize. In her non-concession speech to her supporters (who chanted Denver! Denver! Denver!) she basked in their adulation and enumerated her own victories one by one and cunningly congratulated Obama only for "running the race" but not for winning. What Hillary doesn’t realize (or has forgotten) is that "she" was supposed to be the inevitable nominee – the formidable grande dame of the Democratic party with an interantional name recognition and a vast war chest. Like the fate of the "unsinkable" Titanic, her victories are therefore not the story of this election cycle – her defeat is. Obama, the mostly unknown new comer on the national political stage ("the skinny black man with big ears", as Obama describes himself) was the long shot and he won against all expected odds. That is the remarkable story that the rest of the world will take note of. But incurable narcissists like the Clintons have a hard time accepting that any event of importance can be about someone else. So inflating their own gains and raining on someone else’s parade comes naturally to them.
John McCain in his speech on Tuesday, tacitly acknowledged Obama as the legitimate Democratic nominee and his eventual opponent in the general election. So, even Republicans and the rest of the world recognize the Democratic party’s election results. Sadly, but not surprisingly, it now appears that Hillary Clinton and her diehard fans are the only ones who cannot come to terms with the truth.
Accidental Blogger 
7 responses to “The Long Goodbye or A Fly In The Ointment?”
Don’t fret: she’s indicated tonight that she’s going to concede Saturday. Last night’s speech was less than gracious. But, if Clinton has a speech that would put the “Denver!” chanting genie back in the bottle after the campaign she’s waged in the past couple of months, I doubt it would have had its maximum effect in last night’s heat of the moment, in any event. There’s plenty of time before November for Clinton to show real leadership by campaigning for her stated policies and party through its nominee. I’m in a wait and see mode, but feeling reasonably sanguine.
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Anna,
I wish I didn’t have to fret and actually, I am not that antsy any longer. But the way Hillary decided to concede is something that rankles. She didn’t do it voluntarily. A congressional delegation led by the powerful NY congressman Charlie Rangel had to at last answer her imperious question, “What does Hillary want?”
With the Clintons, the end never seems to be the “end.” Like in some of Brian De Palma’s horror movies where the dead still makes a last grab from the grave, the Clintons seem to reserve one last ace (and another) up their sleeve to deal out as ransom note at an opportune time. So, the fact that Hillary will now give her “concession” speech and include an endorsement of Obama should not necessarily signal an “all clear” green light for the Dems. She says she won’t release her delegates until Denver. Why? So that they can cast their votes for her at the convention and rub it in to diminish Obama’s official nomination? I don’t understand. Why doesn’t she seek to be on the ticket with McCain? She has praised him enough to the detriment of Obama. Certainly, she is not going to be on Obama’s ticket. The only hope is that by the time the convention is held in August, more of her delegates would have defected and she won’t have enough bitter loyalists left to do her narcissistic bidding.
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Thread with assorted Hillary cartoons. Why oh why did she not elect to bow out graciously and earlier?
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Whether you are black, white or brown, a man or a woman, a Democrat, Republican, Independent or politically indifferent and whatever happens in November, you must acknowledge the historic nature of this nomination.
The first three letters to the editor of the NYT on the topic echo your sentiments, Ruchira. Almost verbatim, in fact. The first reads, “All Americans—black and white, men and women, Northerners and Southerners—should pause along with the candidate to reflect on the significance of this event.” I grimace, though, when another letter adds, “Tomorrow morning, all parents can look their children in the eye and say with all earnestness: If you work hard enough, if you are talented enough, you can be elected president.”
Yes, this is an historic day. But let’s not head down the road of propagandizing to our children about America’s purely efficient and objective meritocracy. (I suppose “can be elected” contains a saving ambiguity, but still…)
After reading Brian Leiter’s recent post on Thomas Friedman and his knack for rendering ludicrous journalistic English, I thought this remark from another letter was especially…shall we say, striking?: “I can feel the shards of glass cascading over my shoulders as I look up to the limitless sky that is now my children’s.” I can’t tell whether or not there’s a sad truth expressed by that irony.
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Dean:
When Indira Gandhi was elected prime minister, the plight of most Indian women did not improve necessarily. But it did normalize matters for other powerful women.
I am in complete agreement with you about “propagandizing to our children.” You probably know me by now – I am hardly one for going misty eyed over symbolisms or get goose-bumpy over the dual sensation of hearing “cascading shards of glass over my shoulder” through which I view the sky. It is one thing to acknowledge the transformative nature of an event and quite another to utopianize the future with bad prose!
Having said that, the nomination of a bi-racial man who looks and identifies as black in a country where race is still the stubbornest elephant in the room (no, it is not gender), Obama’s nomination is a very, very important landmark. Why and how it happened, I do not exactly know. Perhaps aging white baby boomers decided to shake off a prejudice which many wished they didn’t harbor and perhaps their kids helped them jump over that last hurdle. Or may be it is Obama the candidate who made it possible. Whatever it may be, with Obama’s success, qualified African Americans can now run for public office with less doubt and trepidation. Just as Tiger Woods put an end to snarky speculations about the Augusta National Golf Club serving “collard greens” at the Masters banquet once and for all and ensuring that the appearance of the next brilliant golfer of “color” will be an unremarkable athletic event.
Sujatha:
Thanks for posting the “cascade” of cartoons. Some are harsh. But Hillary (and Bill) brought some of it upon themselves by their behavior. There is a fine line between tenacity and petulance.
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I kind of think, contra Dean, that it might be important TO propagandize to America’s youth. Lies annoy me, and I’m not certain of the social science, but the theory would basically be that if you tell children they can’t be successful, this will cause them to be less likely to succeed.
Of course, the point is well taken that we’re nowhere even remotely close to an even near-level playing field.
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All the above comments are valid. I do wonder, however, whether we help candidates by focusing on matters of identity politics that prevent them from focusing on issues that would unify their bases. What started out as a critical stance before morphing into a political movement has the potential to prevent anyone from acting on the basis of motives more complex than the essentialized ones that such identity politics would ascribe. Both the advocates of that stance and those reacting against it, are of course justified as well as incorrect in their visions.
Perhaps the focus on race right now, rather than being purely laudatory, is another version of the politics of symbolism, in which gestures and parsed phrases seem to carry more weight than either personal narrative or the logic of political theory and political platforms.
On the other hand, I think Phillip Roth was prescient in portraying a professor damaged by a single, perhaps misinterpreted, remark. When I originally read the Human Stain, I was skeptical. But now I think I understand the pervasiveness of this type of criticism in our mainstream discourse as well as in the academy.
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