Hillary Clinton on Saturday suspended her bid to become America’s first woman president and vowed to help Barack Obama in his fight to win the White House for the Democratic party.
In a gracious, emotional concession speech, Clinton spoke movingly of her long campaign and thanked all those who had supported her. But she left no doubt as to the vigour of her support for Obama and urged a healing of divisions left by a long, bitter nomination battle.
In repeated moments throughout her speech, she vowed to work for Obama, even though some in the audience of thousands of supporters booed at the first mention of his name. ”We have to help elect Barack Obama as president,” she repeatedly emphasised to the crowd gathered in the atrium of the American capital’s National Building Museum.
It was an astonishing moment of political theatre, ripe with symbolism and the passing of a generational torch in Democratic politics. Clinton, for all the revolutionary potential of her bid to be America’s first woman president, lost to a younger politician running on a message of change. For all the nostalgia Democrats feel for the Clintons’ reign of the 1990s, it was not enough to give her victory. Now Obama will press on with trying to unite his party behind his bid to be America’s first black president.
In her speech, Clinton went a long way to making that process a little easier. She tackled head-on the ferocity of the emotions that have grown in the party. She argued that the prospect of another Republican in the White House should unite them all behind Obama, and said she would be personally committed to that goal. She borrowed one of Obama’s own campaign slogans. ”So today I am standing with you to say: ‘Yes, we can!’,’ she said. ”We cannot let this moment slip away. We have come too far and we have accomplished too much.”
At such words, the Democratic establishment’s biggest fear — the nightmare of a convention fight in Denver — evaporated in the humidity of a Washington summer afternoon. In an appealing, joky turn of phrase, Clinton admonished any of her fans who were even thinking of letting their defeat turn them off voting for Obama: ”Please don’t go there. Every moment wasted looking back keeps us from looking forward. Life is too short, time is too precious and the stakes are too high to dwell on what might have been.”
Addressed to the almost 18-million voters who backed her, those poignant words could easily have described her own emotions as the one-time frontrunner. In all the drama of the past few weeks as Obama’s victory neared, it has been amazing to reflect that for most of last year Clinton was the Democrats’ anointed favourite. She had launched her bid by saying ”I’m in it to win it” and for months that seemed like a prophecy.
She had the backing of the party grandees, a huge money-raising machine and the brand name of the Clintons. Yet Obama first unsettled her campaign, then, in the Iowa caucuses, derailed it. It turned into a desperate fight for the party throne, not simply a coronation. It was a fight she has now lost. But Clinton betrayed little sense of inner turmoil at her new-found position as an also-ran. As soon as she took the stage, almost drowned out by cries of ”Hillary! Hillary!”, she remarked she had not expected to find herself here. ”This is not exactly the party I planned, but I sure do love the company,” she joked.
But Clinton’s ‘company’ is now crucial to Obama’s success. She has generated huge support among working class white people and women, where Obama is weak. Her enthusiastic endorsement of him will surely persuade many not to jump ship to Republican candidate John McCain. Her words will particularly resonate with women. In all the amazement at Obama’s success, it has often been forgotten how remarkable Clinton’s achievement was in breaking down the ”glass ceiling” of US politics. In becoming the first woman to come within a whisper of being a Democratic presidential nominee, she shattered barriers on behalf of her sex, proving she is a giant of American politics in her own right, not just as a former first lady.
Clinton’s appeal as a woman was a key part of her success in the latter months of the campaign and she made sure to pay tribute to that. In a moving moment she remarked that many women had become astronauts in her lifetime. ”If we can blast 15 women into space, we will some day blast a woman into the White House,” she said. Doubtless that is true and when it happens (even if it is Clinton in 2012), her campaign in 2008 will be seen as historic. ”When the day arrives and it is a woman taking the oath of office as our president, we will all stand taller,” she said.
But for now, although her rally looked anything but a loss, Clinton is having to accept that she has been defeated. In public, at least, it looks as if she is coming to terms with it. Questions over whether Obama will pick her as vice-president or help her out with campaign debt, will arise in the weeks ahead. But Saturday was simply about bowing out and appealing for unity. She did both with style. – guardian.co.uk