As Hillary Clinton prepares to make her speech tonight, I found a very good article by Marie Coco of the Washington Post. Hillary Clinton will be parsed over and is expected to unite the party. Every breathe and pause she takes will be parsed over by the media as whether or not she has successfully “united the party.” The problem is that Obama’s problem is Obama’s problem. It’s not Hillary Clinton’s job to unite the party for him, it’s his. But like the story of so many women, its the woman who has to come behind and clean up after the men. You see the covers of Obama on Time, Newsweek, People, and all of these magazines that give him such (unwarranted) adulation, I can’t help but admire Hillary Clinton. Just as she beat Obama in debate after debate, yet the Obama-media gave adulation to Obama, though all he did was repeat a lot of what Hillary said, she now has to put on a good face and keep going, trying all she can to clean up for this man. She is expected to unite the party and has to do it with a smile or else she will be barbecued as she was in the media because she didn’t automatically endorse Obama that night. The article has very good points:
If there is a political job more fraught with peril than running to
become the next commander in chief, surely it is being cast as
cheerleader in chief.Hillary Clinton
will be damned if she looks too methodically perfect, too much the
purveyor of practiced routine and not enough the cheery personification
of enthusiasm. She’ll also be damned if she’s too exuberant, too
obviously raising her voice in unbridled exhortation for the team. She
will either be deemed too cool or all-too-cagily warm.Clinton can’t win tonight. But then, she knows that.
She is set to address the Democratic National Convention
in Denver to give the valedictory address of her 2008 campaign — a
race in which she went further than any woman in American history
toward the elusive goal of electing a female president. But this speech
is also meant to soothe her bruised supporters and get them to support Barack Obama,
a man who — for not a few of them — has brazenly overtaken the
more-qualified woman to grab the prize and, in so doing, has writ large
the story of their own lives.Clinton is a woman who knows how to lose — to lose any shred of
privacy, to lose face, to lose any expectation of being treated with a
modicum of respect by the talking heads in the media and, now, to lose
a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination that she expected to
win. As if to heap insult upon injury, the Obama campaign let it be
known that it did not for a minute seriously consider Clinton as a vice
presidential candidate, notwithstanding the 18 million votes she earned
during the primaries and her demonstrated ability to win over white,
working-class voters who remain cool to Obama and who are necessary for
victory in the fall. A reference to those 18 million cracks in the
glass ceiling, which the Obama forces conceded could appear in the
party’s platform, would be just words.In her 2003 memoir, “Living History,” this is how Clinton described
her reaction to her earliest political loss, during her senior year in
high school: “I ran for student government president against several
boys and lost, which did not surprise me but still hurt, especially
because one of my opponents told me I was ‘really stupid if I thought a
girl could be elected president.’ As soon as the election was over, the
winner asked me to head the Organizations Committee, which as far as I
could tell was expected to do most of the work. I agreed.”The work of the next phase of Clinton’s career has been going on
doggedly, and often with little notice, since she suspended her
campaign on June 7. She’s been a campaign emissary for Obama to the
Sheet Metal Workers union; to Hispanics and others in New Mexico and
Nevada; to older women in South Florida who still haven’t quite
accepted the loss of what for some of them may be their last chance to
see a woman elected president. The speech Clinton made in departing
from the race was, among Democratic activists, “probably the most seen,
talked about, buzzed about speech of the campaign,” says Mike Lux, a
consultant for Democratic interest groups and an Obama supporter. It
went over well, even among Obama loyalists.That tends to be how Clinton does things. The public Clinton doesn’t usually show hints of the private pain that burns inside.
The same cannot be said of some of her supporters, who can be
expected to stage at least a few demonstrations of their fury at the
outcome of the race and at what they perceive as repeated displays of
disrespect that Obama has shown their hero. It is not lost on them that
in selecting Joe Biden
as his running mate, Obama chose a Washington insider who voted in
favor of the Iraq war — two of the sustained attacks on Clinton that
Obama used to devastating effect during the primaries.The television cameras will linger on angry and tearful Clinton
delegates in the convention crowd. The commentators will no doubt take
this as a demonstration of disunity — and not a few will, of course,
blame Clinton.But it is usually the job of the party nominee to build unity once a
vanquished rival has conceded and made the right gestures. Unless the
loser happens to be a woman. Then it’s just like high school, and she
must do the work.
