Senator Clinton,
We all listened in rather shocked amazement and then stunned bewilderment to your speech this evening. We heard you as you touted the accomplishments of your campaign, and wondered if you were summing up, ticking off the milestones and the victories, or, as it became increasingly clear, repeating not only the words, but more importantly, the context of what had become your standard stump speech. But then it became clear, as you acknowledged Sen. Obama and his supporters only for the "extraordinary race that they have run," and thanked him, as though you were viewing him through the rear-view mirror of your campaign bus as it travels onto the general election, for all he--and we--accomplished.
Never once did you even acknowledge just what it was that he accomplished; and that's rather odd, because it is the same thing you were striving for: a sufficient number of delegates to win our party's nomination: 2117.
And so, what was at first amazing--that you could not even be gracious enough to utter the word delegate--became an issue of jaw-dropping, confounding disgrace, when you said, "This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight."
You need not decide anything; we have already decided.
We will have decided that, as a party, we are so energized that we will have broken primary turnout records in almost every state, and that of the approximate 35 million of us who voted, we have decided that you will, by the time the final tallies are in, receive slightly less than half of the popular vote. If your math tells you that you won slightly more than half of that vote, fine. Take it. It matters not.
There is no need for you to seek the counsel of those who will obediently and eagerly go to your website and, and with a wishful, naïve or profound beliefthat your decision to fight or flee rests on their opinion, tell you what you want to hear. No one should truly believe your continuing this campaign can any longer be done with an ounce of credibility. So, while you will most assuredly hear from those who will breathlessly try to rally you on to "Denver! Denver! Denver!," you can trust those of your advisors who are more seriously and soberly telling you, "Hillary, it's all right; you can stop now. It's over, and he won."
You can also trust those who tell you that one thing you cannot change in any real world sense is that the people whose campaign this was, those of us from Maine to California and Washington to Florida, are the people who you need to listen to, and we have already spoken. We did so in primary after primary and caucus after caucus. We did so in January, on Super Tuesday, in the factory towns of Ohio and the Texas range. We spoke with our votes--those prayers you talked about last evening--those things, you said yourself, that our Democratic Party counts every one of. Yes, we do; we count every one. We did that for the last 5 months, and in the end, the count ended with Sen. Obama amassing a delegate total that will give him the nomination. If you disrespect that fact, either by not acknowledging it or by continuing this bloody fight, you tell us our votes do not count. You tell us that the decisions we made are invalid and must therefore be subordinated to your decision.
Well, that's not right.
For what we have also decided is, contrary to Mr. McAuliffe's screeching introduction of you last evening as the "next President of the United States," you will not be our party's nominee. We, we the voters, have decided as a country that Barack Obama will be our nominee and that we will support his candidacy against John McCain and the Republicans.
So, as to the question of whether you will continue your campaign for the nomination so as to continue some now truly Quixotic quest for something you will not have, that decision is not, and never was, yours; it was ours. And we decided.