Hillary Clinton in her victory speech of last night, finally congratulated Barack Obama on his brilliant campaign. In this, we can infer oblique recognition of the fact that Obama has achieved his victory. Still, Senator Clinton pleads for a few more days to reflect on the campaign, even as she reiterated her polarizing fiction that she has won more votes in these primary contests and caucuses than anyone in the history of the Democratic Party, including the candidate that bested her.
The problem is, Senator Clinton has already had three month since she effectively lost the nominations to reflect. During that time she has forgone thought and reflection, maturity and patriotism, selflessness and party loyalty, and redoubled her efforts to besmirch and demean the voters’ choice: Barack Obama. John McCain is qualified to be president, she repeatedly declared; Obama is not—an empty suit that happened to utter a few fortunate phrases once upon a time in fairytale land. She and her husband tirelessly plumbed the racial divide, which, because of the consistency of the effort, eventually gained traction and helped her sweep Appalachia. She became a superhero in her white cape, a kind of female Elvis. She then went to work on polarizing the party membership with sharp and sustained accusations of sexism, creating an unforgiving militancy amongst her constituents that sees only that Hillary, popular vote in hand, was unfairly defeated due to gender prejudice on the part of a party that is itself feminine by majority. She was finally hell bent on establishing that the party rules that her loyalists had put in place, when her Super Tuesday Triumph was preordained History, were designed to deprive her of a legitimate victory, attested to by popular vote, ignoring the fact that she required counting votes that constituted an illegal electoral event of no significance whatsoever beyond the delusional world of Clinton propaganda.
The loyal Clinton lieutenants claim that this was a non-divisive campaign by any historical standards. This seems another reason to dismiss the veracity of any statement that comes from the Clinton camp. They say that Hillary was only right to continue to campaign. Who asks a sport team, they collectively chime, to end the game in the fourth quarter with two minutes to go? Well, this is one game that should have been called by the half. The point that the Clintons fails to concede is that they were supposed to be playing for the same Democratic Party team as Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson, Barack Obama, Dennis Kucinich, Joe Biden, Mike Gravel, and John Edwards. Instead of respecting the collective good of the party, the Clintons went all out to try to sack their own quarterback in order to give their own erstwhile comeback kid her big chance. Wasn’t it their party anyway? The old gang wanted their old jobs back, and, damn, they were used to getting their own way. The old backers wanted their Lincoln bedroom reservations restored, and, damn, they had the money to demand it. Do as we order, they brayed, or we will stop funding Democratic Party candidates. The Clinton way or the highway. Never before has the highway seemed so high. If the party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter had to kindle racial and gender resentments, so be it! We Want Clinton!
In the beginning, the choice seemed clear. Barack Obama represented judgement, integrity, truthfulness, unencumbered decision-making after a woeful period in which propagandists held power and the Clinton wing of the party played ball. Only the likes of Teddy Kennedy and Robert Byrd were there to try to stop the Senate’s rubber stamping of the Iraq War resolution, Hillary was having too much fun rattling her sword. Obama had been a straight-talking thinker when the world was readily accepting Colin Powell’s artist’s concepts as some kind of empiric truth. It was the lies of the Bush administration that so undermined American prestige, power, and position in the world, and Hillary and Bill helped make them possible.
Eventually, proving she is as nimble as her husband, Hillary Clinton managed to co-opt all of Obama’s positions, without ever needing to explain her lack of judgement on issue after issue. Her flights of fancy and volleys of contradictory statements never seemed to be considered disqualifying by the media or by those “hard working Americans, white Americans” that made her campaign’s hard fought end seem so valiant, somehow akin to Lee’s post-Gettysburg prolongation of civil war. To me, the vain prolongation of civil warfare seems hardly valiant. Looking about the scorched earth of the Democratic Party, this has all been about personalities. The only principle invested in the Clinton campaign: “Me, me, me”. Let her take all the time in the world, but it hardly seems likely after all this that Hillary Rodham Clinton is capable of the type of reflection a true leader should constantly indulge.