Senator Hilary Clinton has finished her address to the Democratic National Convention. My personal response: She didn’t hit it out of the park but she definitely got some extra bases and maybe batted some runs in.
I think she delivered a full-throated, crystal clear indictment of the past eight years and of John McCain’s alignment with it. It was a bit corny but I liked the line about McCain and Bush meeting in the Twin Cities because you can hardly tell them apart. Senator Clinton did a good job enunciating what the Democratic Party is for — things like universal healthcare and improved public education — as well as what the Party is against — such as military adventurism, crony capitalism, and the abandonment of civilized society to a race of all against all. I still believe that had she delivered this message consistently throughout the primaries, rather than focusing on her opponents, she would have made the hurdle and would be speaking tomorrow instead of last night.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the speech was nonetheless still mostly about her — her experiences on the trail, her motivations for running, etc. That’s to be understood and it was a historic campaign, so it can be forgiven. She spent a little too much time on that, and she did detour into the end into a polishing of the legacy of President Clinton. If you tuned in to the middle and you cut out before the last few moments, you would be forgiven for thinking this was a Clinton acceptance speech.
In fairness to the senator, she did explicitly exhort her supporters to go full-guns for Senator Obama in the general. She called out the incredibly lazy and illogical meme that Republicans are trying to foist, i.e., that anyone who supported Hilary Clinton should snub Barack Obama and instead vote for John McCain — even though the two Democrats share 95% of the same positions and even though John McCain has reinvented himself as a Karl Rove toady. And she took the right tack, which was not to attack the fallacy but to ridicule it. “No way, no how, no McCain” has a nice ring to it. Several times she said flatly, “Barack Obama is my candidate”.
Unfortunately, that’s where the speech fell short, too — because there are two meanings of “flatly”. Yes, she was clear and unequivocal. But she was also surprisingly indirect. She did not mention Senator Obama’s qualifications for president; for her, the clincher is apparently merely the fact that he has the (D) after his name. While that’s not a bad reason, what the party needed was for her to embrace Obama qua Obama, not just as “the guy who barely beat me”. Most emphatically, she needed to use this vast public platform to renounce the criticisms she made in the debates … the criticisms that right now form the backbone of McCain’s attack ads. She needed to take the wind out of those sails, and she did not.
In fact, what she needed to do is something that, it would seem, a Clinton cannot do: She had to say that she was wrong. Actually, even more weakly, she had to say merely that she was mistaken — we can leave the morality of “wrong” out of it. She could have said that, since the two campaigns have begun working together, she has seen a side of him she hadn’t appreciated before. It wasn’t necessary for her to swallow her pride and say he is more qualified than she; but she had to say that he is qualified. Having explicitly made the opposite claim on videotape, she needed to dispel it. At this, she failed; and so this speech was not what it should have been.
Ironically, this makes Senator Clinton’s future even more inexorably intertwined with Senator Obama’s. If Obama goes on to become the 44th President, people will remember this speech as a pivotal test for the campaign which lifted him up and started the Democrats, at long last, into their national strategy. Clinton will be set up to become the heir apparent to Ted Kennedy as Liberal Lion of the Senate, or if she chooses, to move into a Cabinet position or, perhaps, even a Supreme Court seat — in all cases, praised for her integrity and self-denial that cemented the support of her people for the candidate. But if Obama goes down to defeat, he takes Clinton with him… because, in memory, her speech will seem tepid and hedged, at least to his fervent supporters — and there are 18 million of them, too, remember. Come 2012, the Democratic Party will be long tired of the squabbling and a third candidate will likely take the nomination, neither Obama nor Clinton.
Of course, if you only watch the mainstream media, you won’t have gotten that speech. Instead, you’ve probably be treated to more important questions, like: Why did Michelle Obama look “angry”? Who choose the pantsuit worn by Senator Clinton? Because after all, those are the questions on which the election to be leader of the free world should turn…
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