Graciousness
godly; marked by kindness and courtesy; marked by tact and delicacy; characterized by charm, good taste, generosity of spirit, and the tasteful leisure of wealth and good breeding; used conventionally of royalty and high nobility
Hillary let the world know with the timing and delivery of her speech that she does not intend to be perceived as gracious in any sense of the word. Obama's speech was delivered about an hour before Clinton's, and indeed first refers her in the third paragraph, wherein he goes on to talk about her strength and tenacity in the campaign, and brings them up as strong points for her. Let me rephrase: he praised her and her campaign before he ever talked about his.
His supporters are largely on the same page, cheering the mention of her name and, if not cheering, at least not booing Obama's mention of her and Bill as leaders of the Democratic Party. This is in marked contrast to the "DEN-VER! DEN-VER! DEN-VER!" chant of Hillary's supporters, both at the meeting of the Rules and Bylaws Committee and at her speech on Tuesday night. The implication of the chant seemed to be "to hell with party unity - there's still a slim chance we can pull this out!"
Further contrast can be found in the content of her speech, which reads more of a standard stump speech than anything else - and Hillary has HAD to see the writing on the wall for a while now - either make victories in both South Dakota and Montana or pack it in, as Obama will have the delegates he needs to secure the nomination. It's a simple decision tree: make a campaign speech or make a concession speech.
As others have noted, Hillary had a chance to strike a much less discordant tone by graciously conceding the contest, calling for unity, and promising to fight on for one or two issues such as universal health care or dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, she went with what amounted to a large middle finger to the sections of the party that either support Obama or simply want to see the nomination process resolved quickly and decisively in order to move on to the real struggle. Obama struck this note with pitch-perfect precision: he acknowledged the contributions of Hillary both in terms of the historical aspect of a woman running for president - quite hard, I may add - and in terms of the goods that she brought to the party as a whole.
This, in contrast to Hillary's speech, seems to be at the heart of the matter: whereas Obama and McCain have both moved on to locking metaphorical horns with each other, with each moving to solidify their hold on their parties and bring former Clinton supporters into their camps, Hillary has yet to reciprocate with Obama, instead making vague hints about sliding into Obama's vice presidential slot. And pardon the snark, but I thought that one of the privileges of winning your party's nomination is that you get to pick your VP.
In the end the machinations of the primary season will all be for nought, as Hillary will concede or suspend her campaign sometime in the near future, possibly as soon as Friday Saturday. She and Obama will hug, I'm betting there will be tears and possibly some "DEN-VER!" chants, but nothing too serious. However, the damage has been done, the tone has been set, and it's going to be some time before the bad blood between the two camps is resolved or faded away. That discordant tone? It's the hallmark of people who are not gracious.
What I'm Doing...
- Headed home with a mess of lumber in the car. The entire car. 2 days ago
- Got a fish tank and some chairs too. Not inclusive of the $100. 3 days ago
- $100 hot tub - score! Now to move it the 400 feet to the house... 3 days ago
- More updates...
Posting tweet...
Last Listened To
- Queen – You're My Best Friend
- Queen – Bicycle Race
- Queen – Fat Bottomed Girls
- Queen – Killer Queen
- The Raconteurs – Steady As She Goes
June 5th, 2008 - 10:47
It’s kind of sad that my first comment on Erudity has to be an angry one, but c’est la vie.
Of all the presumptions of Obama supporters, I think the most infuriating one is that “decency” somehow required her to preserve Obama’s chances to become president, at least someday, when ALMOST NONE of his supporters, nor the candidate himself, felt the least bit obligated to do the same for her.
It was perfectly OK for Obama to link HRC with everybody’s bad memories of the ’90s, as if the Republican slime machine was not a good 95% of the cause of that unpleasantness, for example. But let Hillary make a perfectly valid and not at all racist remark contrasting the roles of LBJ and MLK in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, and Obama people start waggling their eyebrows and talking about coded language. Hillary has to own the ravings of that asshole Bob Johnson, but Obama is allowed to float serenely above the insulting drivel Samantha Power puts out.
I know that everybody who reads this will claim plausible deniability, and mention how they actually respected Hillary before South Carolina / Philadelphia / “hard-working white people” / whatever, but now they don’t. But let me tell you that in the blogosphere and comment sections thereof, your fair-minded views are a distinct minority. For a sizeable fraction of the Obama fanbase is built out of people who have no higher goal than to put an end to the political aspirations of Hillary Clinton, Clintons more generally, and the centrist/DLC wing of the Democratic Party. For them, “change” means “destroy the idea that the Clintons were good for the Democratic Party, or the country more generally.” Despite ample evidence to the contrary.
These are the people who started yelling that any role the superdelegates played other than unanimously validating their razor-thin margin of pledged delegates with a dozen contests left to go was tantamount to STEALING THE NOMINATION (all caps), despite the fact that their candidate didn’t manage to win enough of those pledged delegates to win outright.
So no, Obama supporters, Hillary was not the first one to play the race card, and she was not the first one to attempt to delegitimize the rules of the contest, in attempting to seat the MI and FL delegations. That was your boy’s campaign and supporters who did that.
Am I disappointed that Obama won the nomination? Not really. He’s a fine candidate and will be a fine president; I supported the other candidate but the differences between them were small enough that (as with academia) the contest became very personal and somewhat ugly at times. But overall the length of the primary was a good thing for the party and for Obama — can you seriously claim it’d be better for those Rev. Jeremiah Wright videos to come out on October 30th instead of in April?
But I am very disappointed that the media, rather than being impartial, came out against the candidate they didn’t like. And their reasons for not liking her were typically petty: “Clinton fatigue.” Ladies and gentlemen of the press, your job is not to write story arcs, your job is to report the news. Didn’t you learn that after the disaster you fostered in 2000? The country could give a good god damn if you are tired of covering the Clintons, and would rather cover a “fresh” story. That pettishness is what angered all those Clinton supporters and made them so hostile the candidate you liked better: it turned into advocacy, and disrespect for a fine public servant, and your arrogant and juvenile whininess in moaning “Why won’t she GO AWAY?” for the past six weeks has made me wonder what priority, exactly, the public interest holds in your list of core values. I suspect it is not high.
Back to the topic: maybe HRC wasn’t as gracious as Obama partisans feel she should’ve been. Maybe she’s just not as nice a person as BHO. But she wasn’t running on being nice; Barack Obama was. And when he made those oh-so-subtle remarks conflating Clinton politics with Gingrich politics, he deliberately underlined fifteen years of right-wing slander and poisoned the well against her. I remarked at the time that her campaign against him was based on experience — his campaign against her was based on character. She ran against him with the message “not yet” — he ran against her with the message “never again.”
You tell me which is the more “gracious” campaign strategy.
— Ajax.