Hillary's concession speech.

[Michael-Adams]

I caught most of it and it was, perhaps, the best speech she has given in the last year and a half. She is still angling for VP or a significant cabinet position in an Obama administration, but she is strongly supporting his candidacy and campaign and has begun the process of unifying the party behind Obama.

[FSM]

i thought she did just swell today. that is what should have happened on Tuesday evening. in the grand scheme of things, it probably doesn't matter and hopefully the dems can unite and move forward in the next 5 months.

[yoyo52]

I heard most of it and thought it was pretty good. But I also heard the one on Tuesday and didn't object to it. After going full blast for a year and a half, she couldn't possibly have stopped cold without getting in touch with her staff and her major supporters. I did think that her introduction of Tuesday as the next president was silly, but it wasn't she who said it.

[Celandine]

yoyo52 Wrote:I heard most of it and thought it was pretty good. But I also heard the one on Tuesday and didn't object to it. After going full blast for a year and a half, she couldn't possibly have stopped cold without getting in touch with her staff and her major supporters. I did think that her introduction of Tuesday as the next president was silly, but it wasn't she who said it.

For sure. Perhaps I have a high threshold for "OUTRAGE",
but I find most of what gets many people's feathers ruffled
makes me reflect more upon the motive than the message.
(or maybe my reticence toward group mentality reactions)
So I just brushed aside the Tuesday Outrage, I'm sorry to
have missed the Friday or Saturday Speech... maybe I can
catch it on YouTUBE.

But I DID get a chuckle out of thinking about the infamous
2000 Election, and PRESIDENT Gore gracefully stepping down
following what many people considered a systematic campaign
of a "Death By A Thousand Cuts" shotgun-blast of voting fraud,
employing every trick to swing the election used since the days
of Julius F. Caesar! ("Dimpled Chads" My Dimpled Arse!!!)

...anyway...
I got a chuckle thinking about what it would take to get Hillary
to agree to 'stop the recount' if push had come to shove.
.

[FSM]

i think that's letting her off too easily Al. it wasn't like Obama winning on Tuesday was a surprise. it's been inevitable for quite some time. her campaign tried to spin it much like you've written, but that's a cop out. she could have easily suspended her campaign on Tuesday and waited to fully endorse Obama (much like Edwards did), but she came out much more defiant on Tuesday even making a small case that she was the winner of the popular vote and asking folks to let her know what to do on her website . . . because she wasn't ready to make a decision (as if she had a decision to make). i thought that Tuesday version sucked and that yesterday's edition was about as good as it gets.

[FSM]

there's a good article in the NY Times today that describes some of this end game. here's a snippet:

Quote:By the time the campaign tracked down the small-city Indiana mayor, Bill Clinton was in a lather. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had lost the North Carolina primary that evening and was eager to offset it with a win in Indiana. But a vote-counting delay in one county threatened to rob her of a prime-time victory speech.

The Clinton campaign called a supporter for help. “I’ve got an angry president here and a candidate who wants to know whether or not she won,” a local campaign representative told the mayor, Thomas McDermott Jr. of Hammond, Ind. Mr. McDermott could hear Mr. Clinton railing in the background. “It’s not very often you basically have a former president yelling at you to get the numbers out,” he recalled.

The yelling was for naught. Mr. McDermott said he had no control over the vote count and, in the end, the late results cemented a negative narrative for an evening dominated by the North Carolina defeat with little attention focused on the eventual Indiana victory. The night of May 6 became the moment that Mrs. Clinton’s desperate comeback bid for the Democratic presidential nomination finally crashed against the reality of delegate math. All she had left was the perception of momentum, and suddenly, that was gone.

the long road to a Clinton exit

[yoyo52]

Pride goeth before a fall.

[NewKojak]

Michael-Adams Wrote:I caught most of it and it was, perhaps, the best speech she has given in the last year and a half. She is still angling for VP or a significant cabinet position in an Obama administration, but she is strongly supporting his candidacy and campaign and has begun the process of unifying the party behind Obama.

Stylistically, she did wonderfully. I think that her goal in terms of speechmaking was to dovetail her identity-based message into the Obama campaign, which works incredibly well. I would have liked to see her do a little more to neutralize some of the bitter feelings that her campaign stoked, maybe by adding a prominent phrase about Sen. Obama winning the popular vote as well as the most delegates, but that may have not been fitting. She dug herself into quite a hole the previous Tuesday, when her biggest applause lines were suggestions that she would fight it out to the convention. She backed out in as artfully a way as possible and she deserves credit for that.

The thing to remember in terms of this endorsement is not the organization that Sen. Clinton controls. It's the identity. Sen. Obama does not need her infrastructure, he needs her personality. In the coming months, she should go on a few campaign swings with Sen. Obama while President Clinton stays at home and mopes.

[NewKojak]

FSM Wrote:i think that's letting her off too easily Al. it wasn't like Obama winning on Tuesday was a surprise. it's been inevitable for quite some time. her campaign tried to spin it much like you've written, but that's a cop out. she could have easily suspended her campaign on Tuesday and waited to fully endorse Obama (much like Edwards did), but she came out much more defiant on Tuesday even making a small case that she was the winner of the popular vote and asking folks to let her know what to do on her website . . . because she wasn't ready to make a decision (as if she had a decision to make). i thought that Tuesday version sucked and that yesterday's edition was about as good as it gets.

To some extent, I wouldn't want to pick on Sen. Clinton too much because her speech on Tuesday was sooooo ineffective from the outside. I am sure that it was fanciful in the room to extend that disbelief a little longer with the "This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight." (source) To the outside though, it just looked like a candidate unable to let go. Put up against the confidence and energy of Sen. Obama's speech and the miserable bumbling that was Sen. McCain's speech, only one of those people looked like a president.

So no harm, no foul? It's a pretty cynical concept, like saying, "at least she didn't break anything." She recovered beautifully though. Probably not enough to undo some of her campaign's behavior during the primaries (which I believe is what wrote her off the ticket), but well enough to continue to be a force in this election. Here's hoping that she continues to speak well, mean well, and do well.

Bill Clinton needs to take his own advice... chill out.

[Michael-Adams]

NewKojak Wrote:while President Clinton stays at home and mopes.

Send him on a junket, a five month one.