Re-Poisoning The Well
I didn’t expect Hillary Clinton to concede and/or endorse tonight, but I certainly didn’t expect her to use her speech as a big “fuck you” to Barack Obama. It’s customary to use the final big speech of a campaign to thank supporters and reflect on the campaign’s themes and accomplishments, but tonight’s speech went beyond that. The ways Clinton used her speech tonight to further divide the Democratic party makes it seem as if my last post was written with the help of a time machine. I wrote about Clinton using rhetoric to give voters the impression that “Barack Obama’s victory is somehow illegitimate”, now take a look at her speech :
Who will be ready to take back the White House and take charge as Commander-in-Chief and lead our country to better tomorrows? People in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the territories, all had a chance to make your voices heard and on Election Day after Election Day, you came out in record numbers to cast your ballots. Nearly eighteen million of you cast your votes for our campaign, carrying the popular vote with more votes than any primary candidate in history. Even when the pundits and the naysayers proclaimed week after week that this race was over, you kept on voting.You are the nurse on the second shift, the worker on the line, the waitress on her feet, the small business owner, the farmer, the teacher, the miner, the trucker, the soldier, the veteran, the student, the hard working men and women who don’t always make the headlines but have always written America’s story. You have voted because you wanted to take back the White House, and because of you, we won together the swing states necessary to get to 270 electoral votes.
In all of the states you voted because you wanted a leader who will stand up for the deepest values of our party. A party that believes everyone should have a fair shot at the American Dream. A party that cherishes every child, values every family, and counts every single vote.
On the very night when Barack Obama sealed the nomination, she couldn’t even be humble enough to acknowledge the fact. Instead, she used her speech to once again insist that she won the popular vote, insist that she’s the stronger candidate against McCain, and make a thinly-veiled jab about Florida and Michigan.
Even worse is that her insistence that she wouldn’t concede was just another plug for her website :
Now the question is, where do we go from here, and given how far we’ve come and where we need to go as a party, it’s a question I don’t take lightly. This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight. But this has always been your campaign, so to the 18 million people who voted for me and to our many other supporters out there of all ages, I want to hear from you. I hope you’ll go to my website at HillaryClinton.com and share your thoughts with me and help in any way that you can.
As Kos notes, rather than be magnanimous tonight, she chose to stir up her supporters even more and end the night with a fundraising appeal. Even as she’s laying off staff and becoming more obvious about her desire for the VP slot, she’s trying to squeeze every last dollar she can out of her supporters to pay off her campaign debts (to herself). And she has the gall to follow up the plug for her website with this :
In the coming days, I’ll be consulting with supporters and party leaders to determine how to move forward with the best interests of our party and our country guiding my way.
Yeah, and I’m sure the reminders about her “18 million” supporters aren’t implicit threats to take her voters and go home. If she truly cared about her party, rather than just HER campaign and HER supporters, she wouldn’t have picked tonight to pour salt the Democratic party’s open wounds and exploited her supporters passions (and disdain for Obama) to try to weasel her way into the VP slot and re-fill her bank account.
Embarrassing. Pathetic. Classless. Disgraceful.
8 comments »
Copy link for RSS feed for comments on this post or for TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
I think she’s a pretty lousy politician to boot. Obama should, and likely will, wait this out. She doesn’t represent 18 million people, she represents the delegates that those 18 million people selected, and those delegates are going to move to end this. 4 yesterday changed from Hillary to Obama, and there will be a slow stream away from her, and that stream will be because those delegates decide that the best way to represent those voters is to move forward rather than dwell on what could have been.
Her media attention oxygen is about to disappear, and Obama will have the stage to reconcile with those 18 million voters, and he has two months to decide what he wants to do about the VP selection. Trial balloons, polls, and positions should provide him with the path to bring them towards him WITHOUT her help, and that just leaves her on the outside looking in. She should realize that whoever Obama picks as VP will have the inside track as the nominee whenever Obama is done running for President. She basically bluffed a position she can’t hold, and if I can see that, so can Obama’s folks. She screwed herself pretty badly last night.
Comment by PSoTD — June 4, 2008 @ 6:33 am
Take a valium!
Comment by Michael — June 4, 2008 @ 6:46 am
Seems like Clinton still believes the super-delegates will fall for the “popular vote” argument.Clinton,like Lieberman, use the Democratic party as long as it keeps them in power,facing defeat,Clinton’s devotion to the party evaporates.Saddly the party is ripe with these phoney Democrates,some are super-delegates,Clinton is counting on this lot,to engineer her coronation.
Comment by pogo — June 4, 2008 @ 7:11 am
And from what I’ve read, her popular vote calculation doesn’t count any from the 5 caucus states, and assumes that Obama gets 0 votes from Michigan because he wasn’t on the ballot.
So, the popular vote argument isn’t just irrelevant, it’s also complete bullshit.
Comment by dAVE — June 4, 2008 @ 12:49 pm
While I think the extremity of your words isn’t entirely necessary, I’m one of many HRC supporters who’s probably with you on this one.
I will say that you can’t be for sure that her fans are too lockstep with her, though. She doesn’t do much good by riling them up, but plenty of us can make up our own minds here. I think she’s driven by ego, but then again, I think Obama’s driven by ego too–he’s just been sly about hiding that. There’s nothing WRONG with this. It pisses people off, especially the educated and enlightened because we know, theoretically, that it’s so repulsive. But you have to be pretty egotistical to want to be the president of the US.
It’s been an ugly primary season, and not just because of the candidates. Supporters on both sides have behaved reprehensibly, and people must set aside their agendas and focus on what’s best for the country. Let’s hope we can all do that.
Comment by Brad Gutting — June 4, 2008 @ 5:27 pm
[...] ignored the (presumptive) victory of Obama over Hillary, and her last-last-last minute swipes at [...]
Pingback by things I’ve ignored in this blog recently « Nuclear Rays From My Halogen Haze — June 5, 2008 @ 12:52 am
A strange take on what seemed to me to be the exact opposite of every bad thing ever said about her by you and many others.
I remain confounded by the inability of Obama supporters to express their support for him in terms other than hatred of Hillary Clinton.
Your man won. Enjoy it. Be gracious in victory and move on to the next opponent. Why do you feel the need to justify victory by taking dental tools to Hillary’s concession speech? She very clearly isn’t the great divider you claimed she was, so maybe that’s what really pisses you off more than anything – being wrong about her. If the past is any indication, you’ll spend the next five months documenting all the ways Hillary continues to sabotage Obama’s efforts, meanwhile John McCain will coast into the White House behind your back. Then you’ll spend the next four years claiming that if Hillary had only conceded after Iowa, Obama would’ve been president.
Comment by Mr. Conspiracy — June 9, 2008 @ 11:09 am
Did you even bother to read the post you’re replying to? This is a response to Hillary’s speech on Tuesday night, in which she continued to imply that Obama’s victory was of questionable legitimacy, not her Saturday speech in which she finally acknowledged that she won’t be the nominee.
Did you even bother to read the post I wrote after this one? Y’know, the one in which I strongly criticize John McCain?
Comment by greg — June 9, 2008 @ 1:05 pm