Yes, we can rally the party around Senator Obama, especially with the help of Hillary Clinton.
As brownsox just reported a little while ago, Hillary Clinton has emailed her supporters announcing that on Saturday she will "extend [her] congratulations to Senator Obama and [her] support for his candidacy."
There were some low moments in this nominating battle, and some things said and done that many of us wish had never occurred. But now, with Hillary Clinton signaling that she's prepared to unambiguously acknowledge that Barack Obama is the nominee, that she supports him, and that she wants her supporters to do the same, we should be able to start pulling together to do the work, in unity, that will lead to a huge win in November.
Back in February, as Barack Obama racked up a series of big wins, I wrote a piece declaring the contest over, that Barack Obama had ensured that he would be the nominee. There were reports circulating that Mark Penn wanted her to run a scorched earth campaign, and as we've seen since then, the Clinton campaign heeded too much of Penn's advice. In calling on the Clinton campaign to reject the scorched earth policy, I wrote this:
But the opportunity for Hillary Clinton to become a historic leader of the Senate is real. As I've argued repeatedly, there are numerous and strong parallels between the election of 1932 and how this election is evolving. This would provide Hillary Clinton an opportunity to take advantage of an opportunity to create parallels between 1933 and 2009. After all, winning elections are great, but I doubt anyone is a Democrat because of our victories of 1932. But generations of Americans have looked to the Democratic party to lead our country because of the legacy of the New Deal Congresses and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 1932 was the opportunity. But 1933 and afterward is what established the greatness of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats.
If he wins in November, Barack Obama will probably never be considered as great a president as Franklin Roosevelt. For everyone's sake, let's hope he and the country don't face the challenges FDR and the country faced in 1933. But Hillary Clinton has a chance to be as great a Senator as Lyndon Johnson or Robert Wagner. Let's hope she ignores Mark Penn, runs a dignified and positive campaign for the next twelve days, and then becomes Barack Obama's greatest ally.
In an unfinished novel F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote "there are no second acts in American lives." Fitzgerald was a great novelist, but it's a dumb line. Looking at Hillary Clinton's public life, we see she's already had more than one act. After being her husband's First Lady in Arkansas and then in Washington, she's forged her own career in electoral politics, becoming a US Senator and finishing a close second in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. Al Gore found a new path that led to the Nobel Peace Prize. Richard Nixon reinvented himself about a half dozen times. And the model that may be best for Clinton to follow is Ted Kennedy, who put behind him his 1980 primary loss to Jimmy Carter and devoted himself to a stellar career in the Senate, ranking him among the giants of the institution. Let's hope Hillary Clinton finds the role that fits her best. I think it's to become one of the leaders of the Senate. Maybe she has something else in mind. Whatever it is, she will probably be impressive and successful.
But first, all of us—Obama supporters, Clinton supporters, Edwards supporters, people who were with another candidate and Democrats who didn't care all that much who got our nomination—need to applaud Hillary Clinton's move toward unifying the party. As has been repeated here many times, Rahm Emanuel put it best:
The way the loser loses will determine whether the winner wins in November.
Today's message to her supporters is a promising sign that Hillary Clinton will help determine that Barack Obama will be the the winner in November.
Finally, a point about other blogs. Some of us here have watched other political blogs and online communities known for being bastions of Clinton supporters. Most of those blogs and communities will be fully on board with Obama, if they aren't already. At places like MyDD, the community, including most of the pro-Clinton folks, had already been pushing back against anti-Obama garbage for some time. The folks at MyDD--many of whom also participate at Daily Kos--are Democrats, they know that Barack Obama needs their support, and he will have their support. A few other bloggers are simply contrarian, and shouldn't be taken very seriously.
A few other blogs and websites that aren't obviously Republican have trafficked in extremist anti-Obama crap, and continue to do so. Instead of expressing outrage about them, we should starve them of attention.
Hillary Clinton appears prepared to give the signal that Democrats need to come together and do whatever they can to elect and support Barack Obama. Some folks have no interest in joining with other Democrats, even at the urging of Hillary Clinton. If they don't, even if they're on non-Republican blogs, they will demonstrate that they aren't really Democrats.
For everyone else, however, it's important that we all realize that unity doesn't come about when only one side reaches out to the other. Hillary Clinton has begun the process of bringing her supporters toward Barack Obama and his supporters. For those of us who wanted Barack Obama to be our nominee, we must welcome the Clinton supporters, and do what we can to be modest winners, recognize that whatever differences we had in the nomination battle are tiny compared with our differences with the Republicans, and join together to build a stronger Democratic party and put our country on the path to a more progressive future.
