Hillary Clinton's Concession Speech

[UPDATE: Please see the comments section, now that I've watched some of the pundit's reactions, I'm going to put some comments in there about those, if you're interested. --Liam]

I've just had the chance to watch Hillary Clinton's speech from this afternoon (thanks, TiVo!) and I wanted to write up my thoughts before I hear what any of the pundits have to say.

I suspect they're mostly going to focus on the short section in the middle where she strongly argued the importance of electing Barack Obama in November, and I'll admit that if that had been the bulk of the speech, it would have been a great one.

But in the full context, that part of the speech was notable by the small percentage of her verbiage it actually took up.

I understand the first section, thanking all of her supporters and giving them a pep talk about all they had accomplished. She had to get them in the right mood, and indeed they DID accomplish a lot together. Regardless of how you count the votes, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama each got more votes in this primary than any other candidates in the history of Democratic primaries, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. A black man and a woman running for an office which has until now always been occupied by white males, and they shattered all previous records for primary support.

It is the third section of the speech that I take issue with. It is not the content, I do not begrudge her the chance to talk about the role of women and the shattering of glass ceilings, but I believe she should have gone to greater lengths to draw the parallels between the experience of black Americans and the experience of women. One of the things about the Clinton campaign that regularly galled me was the way in which she seemed to want to portray anyone who didn't support her as a sexist supporter of the all-boys club, when in truth by having two pioneering candidates on the ballot, there was no way to support both. I didn't support Obama because he was black, and I didn't support Obama because he was male. I supported Obama because after my candidate of choice dropped out, he was (in my opinion) the best remaining option, running an optimistic and positive campaign and pushing for a lot of the changes I feel are most critical to our nation today.

And so instead of subtly reinforcing the frustration of her supporters that once again a man had kept a woman down, I would rather she had said something about how sometimes in order for progress to occur in one area, it must be delayed in another. Instead of hyping how she'd bumped into the glass ceiling, talk about how great it is that Democrats have broken the color barrier and showed a sincere willingness to break the gender one as well, except that we couldn't do both at the same time this time out.

The third (and it felt to me longest, although I didn't time it) section of her speech reinforced divisions when we need to be coming together. Jim Webb recently spoke on several of the news shows about how the Appalachian peoples are too quick to view the black community as their rivals for support, when in fact the two share a great many similarities and should come together to work for a new America in which both of their fortunes improve. Hillary Clinton left me with the impression that after vehemently arguing that Democrats all have to get behind Barack Obama, she had to take the bellows to the flame of disaffected feminists everywhere. She may have told them all to work for him, but she continued the implied message that it was sexism, and that she would work for Obama, but only because McCain was a worse alternative.

What Hillary Clinton needed to do in this speech was help her supporters to see that either the first candidate of African descent or the first candidate with two X chromosomes was going to have to lose in favor of the advancement of the other ground-breaking candidate, and that rather than being upset that women didn't win, they should rejoice that a blow was struck against racism, with enough of a second effort against sexism that next time it'll be that much easier to take that one out.

She didn't do it. And I believe the difference between the speech I describe and the one she actually gave is the difference between the most hard-core of the "I'll vote for McCain if Hillary doesn't get the nomination" of her supporters supporting, however reluctantly, Barack Obama and those same extreme supporters making good on their threat, and in a year where we can hardly afford the John McCain of 2008 (and with no sign of the John McCain of 2000), those are votes the Democratic party and the nation can't really afford to lose.

To be clear, I hope we have a female President one day, perhaps even soon. But today is the day to celebrate the ascendency of the dark of skin. Belittling that by continuing to imply that your own loss was because you just couldn’t hit that glass ceiling hard enough to break through institutionalized sexism sends the implied message that you still don't believe Obama is a legitimate nominee. And that isn't unity. And it's not even true.

Liam.