Well done, Hillary
This wasn’t my favorite Hillary speech (her concession speech on June 7th was, I think, the best of her career so far)… that said, she did exactly what she needed to do here. I’m proud of her, and even though I’m sure she’ll be scruitinized somehow, I think she did everything she could’ve done under less than ideal circumstances. It’s such a difficult task to write and execute a speech like this because there’s such a delicate dance between “I’m still here” and “I back the guy who won.” I also think that Republicans can go back to hating her now… Tonight’s speech was all Democrat, and all amazing.
Ezra Klein writes in this post:
Clinton’s message was simple: Her candidacy was about something, not someone. She is a Democrat, not a Hillaryite. And if her supporters believed in her, then that’s what they were signing up for: An effort to expand health care, and weight economic policy towards the middle class, and refashion American foreign policy into something sane and recognizable. The candidate left in the race with a similar set of beliefs is Barack Obama.
[…]
It wasn’t a speech about Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton, or even George W. Bush. It was a speech about being a Democrat, and what electing a Democrat will mean for the country. Tonight, she was the party’s standard bearer. And she, and those of her supporters who aren’t using her candidacy as a means to elect John McCain, deserved that.
From Hillary’s speech tonight:
“I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?”
Obama/Biden 2008!
(ps: Bill looked so proud of her - it was really cute. The end.
