Angry Women [Source]

Hillary Clinton may have come out full bore for the Barack Obama campaign on Saturday, but many of her supporters are having none of it. Watch the first video above, which sums up the palpable anger many of her supporters feel.

Another must-see Web stop is Ed Hale's site, hcsfjm.com. That is shorthand for Hillary Clinton Supporters for John McCain. Hale claims to have garnered 35,000 supporters within a week of launching the site.

The Democratic National Committee either doesn't get it or refuses to admit it. Nothing short of a lengthy, detailed mea culpa by the DNC and by Obama himself, directed to Clinton supporters for the sexist name-calling and personal, nasty characterizations Clinton was alone forced to endure, will do.

Even that may not persuade these voters to consider supporting the party this fall. The DNC, Democratic Party leaders in Congress, and Obama should have been at her side, calling her treatment by the media (and even by some Obama supporters) unacceptable.

According to most polls, something in the range of 20 to 25 percent of her 18 million supporters say they'll vote for Senator McCain in November. That's 4.5 million votes—too many to take for granted.

Yet taking them for granted is just what the party and Obama are doing. When CNN's Candy Crowley asked Obama how he would appeal to disaffected Clinton voters, he missed the mark entirely, giving a standard set of policy proposals.

I appeared on one of the cable news networks over the weekend, paired with a political reporter from a major newspaper.

We were asked whether her supporters would kiss and make up with the Obama camp and end up throwing their support to the Illinois senator in the general election. He said, dismissively, "yes."

I responded that with all due respect I thought he was quite wrong. But his laissez-faire attitude typifies that of the bulk of the MSM, the Democratic Party, and the Obama campaign.

We won't know how her supporters will vote until after the general election and its exit polls.

Those who sit it out won't even be counted in exit polls. My feeling is just as the MSM underestimated the reaction to anti-Clinton remarks would generate, and the DNC overestimated voters' party loyalty, that no one has a clear read on what comes of all this.

The party may have created a miniboom in Republican registration—disaffected Democrats who will never vote for a Democratic candidate again.

There's also the question no one is addressing: With Clinton's absence in the race, middle-of-the-road voters have nowhere to go.

McCain isn't conservative enough as far as religious conservatives are concerned. But he's seen as solidly conservative by everyone else and calls himself a conservative.

Obama has the albatross of the National Journal's rating as the No. 1 most liberal member of the U.S. Senate. Senator Clinton had come in 14th on that list, which puts her much closer to the middle of the road.

Mainstream voters have three choices. They can hold their noses and vote for an extreme liberal or a fairly extreme conservative. They can sit it out, or they can write someone in.

As one voter told me, "This is a 'vote against' election." There's no one for moderates to vote for.

Hillary Clinton's Sacrifice [Source]

By ending her campaign and endorsing Barack Obama,

Hillary Clinton gave up a considerable amount of political capital

Coverage of Hillary Clinton's speech on Saturday has accurately, glowingly praised it as graceful. But few commentators have given Hillary credit for how gracious it was.

Barack Obama was not entitled to demand her wholehearted and full-throated endorsement. And he knew he needed it badly in his attempt to quickly win over voters who supported her. In the end it was a gift she gave to him.

In 1976 and 1980, respectively, Ronald Reagan and Ted Kennedy fought to the convention for their parties' nomination. Reagan was criticised at the time by much of the Republican party establishment for having damaged Gerald Ford.

Kennedy - who went to the convention some 900 delegates down on Jimmy Carter - famously refused to shake Carter's hand on stage.

But Reagan became president four years after his convention battle, and in the wake of his failed bid Kennedy became a lion of the Senate and a godfather in the Democratic party.

Why were Reagan and Kennedy successful in the years following their failed bids even though they suffered harsh criticism in the days and weeks after the ends of their campaigns?

One view is that both Reagan and Kennedy used their departure from the nomination battle to nonetheless claim leadership of a portion of their parties.

Doing so prevented the party establishment (led by the nominee) from marginalising them or taking them for granted, and gave them a lasting platform for which to advocate and from which to launch future efforts.

Not all departing candidates have the political capital to do this. But senator Clinton surely did.

She convincingly won two of the main pillars of the party - women and working-class voters - and more people voted for her than for any candidate in history.

Among her supporters are swing voters in swing states, making them crucial to a White House victory. And even as the pundits buried her candidacy, polls showed her to be a stronger general election candidate than her rival.

There was no doubt that she was going to acknowledge Obama as the nominee in Saturday's speech, but she could have chosen a very different way of doing it.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, a less "graceful" exit - like Reagan's or Kennedy's - would have defended her significant power in the party and given her leverage to get Obama to prioritise issues important to her voters.

Yes, the Democratic elite would have criticised her vociferously, but the Democratic elite are not the Democratic party.

Clinton didn't win a string of primary victories by placating Jeffrey Toobin or Frank Rich. She won by convincing voters she would fight for the issues that mattered to them.

Many of Clinton's millions of supporters were eager to see her fight on to the convention. If she had done so, a short-term barrage of criticism might have been followed, in time, by a lasting consolidation of her position as a voice for key constituencies.

Instead, the speech she gave was imbued with both confidence and humility, and perfectly calibrated to give Obama a boost that he needs.

Knowing that many of her supporters are devastated, and that depressed people are unlikely to become happy warriors, she reassured them that they had accomplished great things together, and told them not to look back and wonder "what if".

She powerfully asserted to them that the way to continue the fight was to join forces with Obama.

Her speech heralded her erstwhile rival's themes, repeated his name 15 times and reiterated again and again that electing Obama president was the best way to accomplish the objectives of her campaign.

She endorsed him from a position of strength, but she did so without qualification. (For comparison, in 1980 Kennedy gave a beautiful address on economic justice, but mentioned Carter only once.)

To all those who have characterised Clinton as driven by craven self-interest, Saturday's speech represents striking counter-evidence.

It was a generous move that put the party's unity and Obama's candidacy ahead of her own interests.

She also placed a great amount of trust in Obama - that he will fight for the issues that matter to her supporters and led 18 million of them to vote for her.

Because she gave him her full support up front, she will have less power than she might have to make sure that Obama advances those causes, or, indeed, to ensure her own place at the table.

Clinton gave him the gift of her endorsement, not because she had to, but because she chose to. In the coming weeks and months Obama will have to earn the votes of her supporters.

But for now, all Democrats should recognise, respect and appreciate the leadership she displayed, the commitment she demonstrated to the party and its candidate and the gracefulness and graciousness with which she did it.

tags: obama  clinton  sexism  president  2008  

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