When this race began, it was Hillary Clinton's to lose.
Hillary lost the race fair and square.
From the comments here, it would appear that not a lot of people here have been around politics long enough to have a perspective on the scale of what has just happened.
Her loss has a Shakespearean tragic quality. As the campaign began to take shape, she made decisions based on assumptions that, while valid at one time, are actually not any more. She and Bill, as astute as they are, failed to see the ground shifting under their feet.
Before you hit the reply button, we all should reflect how this could be the same story for each of us. Please follow to the end of this diary!
Running for office and attempting to make a difference in the rough arena of politics comes with givens. You have to have an armor plated ego. But beyond that, any sort of success in this comes with the need to maintain a commitment through thick and thin and through years and years of struggle. The best activists who have really fostered the progress that we have seen, have always been the untold story of this commitment.
So the core value has to be resolve to stick it out and to see attacks not as personal, but in a cold and strategic sense. This gives you the ability to suck it up and have the courage to do what is necessary, play the hand that is dealt to you instead of complaining, and win the game, whatever the rules are.
But what happens when everything you have learned through years of effort and School of Hard Knox education and all your determination over the years changes in a fundamental way that you aren't prepared to believe?
Hillary's loss perhaps shows that there has been a very deep and fundamental paradigm shift.
A lot of people on Kos have expressed outrage in one form or another at the use of negative attacks by Clinton against Obama, particularly those that use racial "dogwhistling."
If you had come of political age in the 1970s or 1980s, particularly if you have been involved in campaigning, chances are you would be seeing this as no more than standard pragmatic politics. This is what you do.
I remember being very frustrated with that prevailing view in the '80s and was involved with grass roots political efforts to overcome that conventional view. It was hard work, but grass roots organizing paid off then as now.
Several things made the trend seem a permanent condition of the landscape:
-Political consultants who saw the game from a strictly mechanical and pragmatic way of seeing it.
-Media people who have no real knowledge of politics and who rely on consultants,
-Database systems were exclusively in the hands of experts (consultants) who had data processing education and who used mini main frames. (now you see more sophistication by people posting diaries using desktop software.)
Actually Bush and Rove are the apotheosis of this trend. They simply proved that manipulation that is strictly mechanical could trump substance, in a media era where there was no time for critical thinking.
Bushco's mistake was to think that their ability to use the mechanicals of politics made them worldscale policy geniuses. It didn't. They over reached through hubris and in the process, busted the paradigm.
Hillary and Bill, from their vantage point in the center of the Washington bubble, saw how Bush and Rove made it, but not that the bubble had burst.
When the Iraq war vote came up, Hillary Clinton probably knew full well what a lot of people knew: That giving Bush the green light was wrong. But, she gambled that they had the right insight into where the American public was at and she needed to show toughness to Joe Six Pack. Her vote total shows that a lot of people were willing to see this as a mistake and blame Bush more.
Then, in the course of the primary campaign, she and Bill showed that they were unable to let go of the consultant paradigm from the '80s and '80s. By that time, they both had invested too many years in winning political contests to stop and become deeply reflective enough to see that conditions were changing.
They should have gone away from Washington before the campaign began and done some deep thinking and had some deep conversations with the activist base of the party. Instead, they went on the key assumption that nothing had changed fundamentally and the consultants had it right.
She may be having a hard time believing that what has happened has happened. I don't know if any of you has ever suffered a significant loss of someone you loved, but this is essentially the emotion. For a long time, you just can't believe it.
To lose something you have worked for so hard and so long, probably some fifty years, would not be easy to accept. It would be heart breaking.
Now, the numbers are the numbers and the need to unify the party is a huge argument that is quite evident to someone as intelligent as Hillary Clinton is, who has invested so much in the Democratic Party. She will be convinced by her friends to lead a move towards unity and she will have to if she wants a future.
We have to let go of this as well, and focus:
This is huge evidence of a paradigm shift in a progressive direction.
What can we learn from the Republican's mistakes that the next Administration and Congress can use in making progressive policies work?
We have a huge opportunity to get it right. In an ironic way, Bush made it possible.