That Ain’t Any Kind Of Concession Speech I Ever Heard Of
Posted on June 3, 2008 at 9:49 pm“Hey, baby, there ain’t no easy way out. Hey I will stand my ground. And I wont back down.”
Those were the words of Tom Petty piped in through the loudspeakers shortly after Hillary Clinton’s speech tonight in New York City. What this morning’s news was telling us might be be a concession speech turned out to be something else entirely.
What was it though? One of two things, one with her withholding her endrosement and concession one could interpret her speech as a warning to Obama.
“I understand that a lot of people are asking, what does Hillary want? What does she want? I want what I have always fought for in this whole campaign. I want to end the war in Iraq. I want to turn this economy around. I want health care for every American. I want … the nearly 18 million Americans who voted for me to be respected, to be heard, and to no longer be invisible.”
Sure, party unity is going to happen eventually but how quickly and to what extent is ultimately up to Hillary.
Was Clinton essentially saying to Obama, “Listen Hoss, we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way. You can either pick me as your Vice President and we can hold hands together as a ticket and I can become your defacto co-president or I can continue this campaign as “a listening tour” on how to best serve the interests of my popular vote-winning 18 million voters all the way to the convention.”
That, believe it or not, is the charitable view. The alternative is that tonight was not about unity this year. The alternative is that she doesn’t want the Veep the nomination or concessions on health care or any of that mess.
The alternative is that she is simply going to go as long as she can laying the groundwork for 2012. In the speech, you will notice, Clinton calls attention to her popular vote victory. You can quibble with it all you want. Note the uncommitted vote in Michigan. At the end of the day, though, what she says is true. More voters voted for her than any other candidate in a primary in history.
Is Hillary trying to undermine the nominee, Barack Obama, by trying to make herself Al Gore 2.0?
While many Democrats hang their belief that Gore was rightfully elected in 2000 on shenanigans in Florida many are just as emboldened by the fact that he won the popular vote. They are just as emboldened by an electoral college that they view as an illegitimate relic.
Democrats, after all, believe in Democracy. They believe in counting the votes. Clinton clearly reiterated this belief tonight. Many Democrats were clamoring for Al Gore in 2008 because they believed him to be a duly elected president denied victory by an unfair system in 2000, a system stacked against him.
With this speech is Hillary laying the groundwork for her own similar mythology as victim of a Democratic primary system flawly engineered to hand an unelectable candidate victory.
Was this speech not the last one in a defeated campaign for President but the first one in a campaign to become a legend. For if Barack Obama loses this election, there will be revisionism. History is written, they say, by those who have hanged heroes.
Democrats, in the 2000 campaign, were never really all that enthused by Al Gore but the circumstances of his defeat and his subsequent career after it allowed him, through his future actions, to create a new image. To become larger than life. Could not Hillary achieve the same thing?
All signs point to a Democratic victory in 2008. High gas prices, and unpopular war a sagging a economy. By no rights should a member of the incumbent party win this election. Hillary’s campaign might have been defeated tonight and along with it the imposing Clinton machine that has ruled the party since the 90s.
But if Obama loses the general, the circumstances of his primary victory Hillary may very well use to put the band back together with a new image more fierce than her jubilant enemies inside the party tonight could ever imagine.
UPDATE: From Ben Smith:
Her homepage, to which she directed supporters, asks supporters to send Hillary a “message of support”and to “stand with Hillary” — words of confrontation, not concession.
SEE ALSO:
Sadcox
Media Lizzy
Ben Smith
Big Boys react
Brendan Loy
Andrew Sullivan
National Journal
Parsing Clinton’s Speech
Defiance
Comments
10 Responses to “That Ain’t Any Kind Of Concession Speech I Ever Heard Of”
No, sad to say, we haven’t seen the last of Hillary.
We haven’t heard the last of her, and I’m glad. I’m looking forward to her becoming a distaff Harold Stassen, haunting every Democratic primary from 2012 to the crack of doom.
I’m chuckling evilly just thinking about it.
Why would Hillary want to be Obama’s Veep? As you say, if Obama wins in 2008 (and he just might with Hillary as Veep), it is over for Hillary’s Presidential dreams. She can’t be a usurper in 2012 and 2016 is a long way away for what will be an old woman. Picture Helen Thomas in a pink pants suit.
I think that what she really wants is $15-$30 million of Obama’s money, and a big prime to speech at Dem Con 2008, and is playing hardball with him to get them. And I think that she also wants a McCain Presidency. An Obama Presidency, even with her living at One Observatory Circle, gets her nothing that she wants, really.
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Hillary reminds me of one of those “Cops” videos where the guy is being chased by 58 cop cars in his 1978 Camaro, his tires are flat and sparks and smoke are coming out of everywhere. But he won’t stop. And you just want to see him hauled out and given a beat down.
>More voters voted for her than any other candidate in a primary in history.
Of course it’s *also* true that more voters voted *against* her than any other candidate in a primary in history.
That aside, if the latter is her plan, it’s going to backfire if she doesn’t concede quickly and graciously. It will be hard to make the argument that he was inherently unelectable if it becomes accepted gospel that he was shot in the back by this “deranged narcissist” (still my favorite quote of the night).
HRC wants to set herself up as having tried to unify the party, been right about Snobama’s un-electability problem, while subtly torpedoing Oballah (pbuh), and get herself in better financial shape.
So she’ll hold out for a while floating the veep spot as a concession. Obama would be an idiot to give that to her. She’d eat into his spot light, undermine him constantly, bring around all the Clinton baggage, and may not be that useful in the general anyway. Plus he’d need a good life insurance policy after her RFK references. Instead he’ll buy out her debt and hurt himself financially in the process. Meanwhile she’ll keep up her ineffective sniping despite her promise to go quietly into the night. Then when McCain wins she’ll think she’s the Dem front runner in 2012.
Snowbama! Excellent!
Posts like this are what separate ACK from the rest. He has articulated a position he himself does not hold and deployed it at a critical moment in time. That is not an easy thing to do. This is the standard to which all paid bloggers should aspire.
Big props, ACK.
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