They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”
Dear Friends,
If you haven't listened to Hillary Clinton's speech to supporters on Saturday at Washington DC's National Building Museum, get on over to Google and do so. It's twenty-nine minutes of eloquent, moving rhetoric, and it may be her most durable contribution to the goal of electing a woman President of the United States.
If you weren't a Hillary Clinton supporter, it's particularly important to give the speech your full attention.
It included a couple unspoken, valedictory, wistful expressions, which hint at the prospect of not being America's first female president:
“Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it. And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time. That has always been the history of progress in America.”
“When that day arrives and a woman takes the oath of office as our President, we will all stand taller, proud of the values of our nation, proud that every little girl can dream and that her dreams can come true in America. And all of you will know that because of your passion and hard work you helped pave the way for that day.”
History takes strange turns, of course, and Hillary Clinton certainly wasn't bidding a final goodbye to her presidential aspirations -- or anything else, for that matter -- but there was a faint echo of Martin Luther King's speech in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the day before an assassin's bullet ended his life:
“And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy tonight.”
As achingly painful as it must have been to deliver her speech -- a concession camouflaged as a suspension -- Hillary Clinton's tone and demeanor conveyed a clear impression that she had been unshackled from the generic constraints of a high office candidacy where every sentence is parsed, every gaffe magnified, amplified, and YouTube-a-lized, and whose spousal baggage came at a price not even today's bankrupt airlines would dare charge.
It had all the trappings of another Clinton rally -- Bill beaming and biting his lip, Chelsea brimming with pride, and Dorothy Rodham seeming more like a prop than a fixture. But on this day, Hillary spoke with a new voice, unencumbered by dense policy prescriptions, shorn of her ubiquitous first person pronouncements, and absent animosity.
Her supporters were inspired, proud and moved; and for the first time, perhaps, she drew the rapt attention and considerable admiration of many who had found her candidacy wanting. It came too late to change the calculus of the primary season, but early enough to bolster her bona fides as a major force in the Democratic party going forward -- to the Democratic Convention, the general election, and well beyond.
Barrels of ink and billions of bytes will be expended on analyzing why her campaign fell short of the mark -- Iraq war vote; hubris and invincibility; misogyny; bitter internecine campaign organization battles; Bill Clinton; failure to organize caucus states; overspending in early months; too negative; untrustworthy; or just one too many Hillary Clintons in too little time -- morphing from Queen Elizabeth I to Norma Rae, to borrow Newsweek's description.
Or what her intentions and aspirations really are -- Hillary Tosses in the Towel; Hillary's Hat's in the Veep Ring; Hillary Set Sights on Albany; Look Out Harry Reid, Here Comes Hillary; Hillary to Join Supremes? blah blah blah.
Most of it will be (a) patently obvious, (b) wrong, or (c) irrelevant.
She ran. She lost. Her batting average is .667 -- two highly successful Senate campaigns, one very narrow presidential nomination loss. It's a record few attain.
But for this observer, it was Hillary Clinton's finest hour -- an ironic and serendipitous result of her first, most visible, very expensive, and humbling public loss.
It can be the launch of a new phase in her political life, if she chooses that path. One cleansed of the Clinton baggage -- her past, for better or for worse -- and, instead informed by her prodigious policy and political skills, infused by the energy of her gender-breaking trek to the highest reaches of American politics, and punctuated by the grace of her final message in that journey.
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