That Ain’t Any Kind Of Concession Speech I Ever Heard Of

By Kleinheider 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

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Tags: Barack Obama, concession, Hillary Clinton, no decision tonight, Tom Petty, Veep Audition, Won't Back Down