[Crossposted at my blog.]
There were a range of emotions that I had watching Sen. Hillary Clinton give her unity address in Washington this afternoon. But I think that I carry some sadness in watching her effectively end her run for president today, and it comes from just being around my own family of my mother, and sisters, and aunts, and grandmothers. It would have been just as amazing and challenging to watch a woman actually finish the fight to win the White House, as it will be watching Sen. Barack Obama do the same.
Certainly, Sen. Clinton did not break that "highest and hardest glass ceiling". But whether there’s one giant crack, or eighteen million cracks, I think there’s an agreement—the next woman that gets up as high as Clinton did can smash it with nothing more than a tap. Clinton’s candidacy, even with its flaws, just made it easier for your daughters (and mine, if I’m ever blessed enough to have one) to become President of the United States. Clinton managed to do what Shirley Chisholm, Patricia Schroeder, and, yes, Geraldine Ferraro never could.
And I watched quietly, as the junior senator from New York gave her address to her supporters, wanting to reserve judgment until she finally had finished and exited the stage. For all the resentment and anger and disgust I had for Clinton, which had been thawing out the last four days, Clinton melted it all away when she said:
"Every moment spent looking back keeps us from moving forward."
And that’s when it hit me. The time has come to dig a plot and bury the hatchet.
We’ve spent of time parsing over this Democratic primary, rehashing the resentments, replaying the highlights (and lowlights) of this campaign season ad nauseam. And here we are in June, less than five months from the national Election Day, and even now, we’re still doing it.
Undoubtedly, I could write more than a sonnet about how her campaign failed miserably, and with a touch of mockery, taunt her and her supporters. It would be easy to do, given the resentments I carried for weeks about her campaign.
Or, perhaps, we could quibble about the supposed inevitability of Clinton’s run, or her supposed narcissism, or the racist dog whistles, or everything and anything that might have pissed you off about Sen. Clinton.
We could do that. I certainly have the last four months.
Or, we could focus on the man who is living off a legacy of a failed candidacy for president eight years ago; who is trying to sell America on the idea that he’s still that candidate, and isn’t the obvious and typical Republican, bought and paid for by the special interests. We could focus on the candidate who served in our Armed Forces, under many of the same benefits that are barely offered to our troops today, and does not support giving them a better opportunity now. This man who makes unconvincing appeals to voters not inclined to support him; John McCain is no more a maverick than I a race car driver, simply because I own a car. The media will sell him that way, based upon his second-place finish to a man—who he now embraces—that attacked his family in the most sleaziest way in 2000.
But this isn’t 2000, and John McCain isn’t that candidate he was then. Perhaps he never was that candidate. He is what he is—a Republican looking for votes anywhere he can find them.
That some Clinton supporters could consider giving this man an audience, much less a vote, speaks to me as utter hypocrisy. 15 months ago, it was about electing a Democrat to the White House; because it was time to reverse what this God-awful Bush Administration had done to this republic.
Now, because the Democrat(s) you chose isn’t going to win, for whatever reason, you’re going to vote to...continue the status quo? You’re going to vote against your interests? Out of spite?
Are you outside your mind?
I understand the emotional investment into a candidate, but this is not, I repeat, not college football; it’s not Michigan-Ohio State. This is your life, and who you choose as president has an enormous effect on how you will live, not just the next four years, but the next decade. But I don’t need to tell you that; you know that already.
15 months ago, Democrats were committed to electing a Democrat to the White House. There was no qualification, no asterisks, no ifs, ands, buts, or maybes to that statement. So when I hear many of these same Democrats state that they would consider a vote for McCain, I have no alternative but to challenge their commitment—to getting out of Iraq, to getting our economy back on track, to women’s rights, to civil rights, to the advance of science and healthcare, to restoring the respectability of this nation to the world. How committed can you be to those things, and call yourself a Democrat, if you’re willing to sell them down the river because your candidate lost, or whatever oblique, and/or bigoted excuse you want to use against Sen. Obama?
My response to that: do whatever you need to do, vote how you want. But live with the consequences of doing so—that means no more complaining about the war, or lack of equal pay, or whatever else you’ve been complaining about all these years. You yield your right to complain about any of it when you vote for John McCain. And try explaining your stance—a liberal/moderate Democrat voting for McCain—to a family of a soldier on his way to another Tour of Duty in a country that we invaded on a pack of lies.
(And this, coming from a person who wrote in his blog space in March that he would consider voting for McCain himself. Trust me on this—it’s not a good idea. And that post, in the interest of unifying Democratic supporters on either side, has been deleted.)
I suppose that my larger point, here, is that we all need to put the resentments of the Democratic primary in the past. I’ve had to do it. It’s easy to hold a grudge, but it kills you all the same. I’ll close with Sen. Clinton’s own words.
Now, the journey ahead will not be easy. Some will say we can't do it, that it's too hard, we're just not up to the task. But for as long as America has existed, it has been the American way to reject can't-do claims and to choose instead to stretch the boundaries of the possible through hard work, determination, and a pioneering spirit.
It is this belief, this optimism that Senator Obama and I share and that has inspired so many millions of our supporters to make their voices heard. So today I am standing with Senator Obama to say: Yes, we can!
It's time to commit to moving forward. Starting now.