The Post Mordem/HOPE

Over at the Daily Kos, they have broken down the crash and burn of the Clinton campaign in four steps:

1. Why Clinton Lost
   

   "How, though, did Hillary Clinton go from presumptive frontrunner to a pummeled second choice? The most obvious answer: people started voting, instead of just talking about voting, and that right there is when things went off the rails. But could she have pulled it off? How close was she? Was it gaffes and botched strategy that landed her behind Obama, or was Obama simply an unstoppable force? Or were her presumptive chances simply that -- presumptive -- a fiction of media supporters who simply assumed the most well known figure was the inevitable one?"
   

2. Change and the Bush Legacy
   

   "My sense is that voters - including some Independents and Republicans - are so angry at George Bush that in addition to looking forward to new (and actual) leadership, they'd like an opportunity also to hit the "smite" button on Bush's legacy. They want a chance to voice their disgust and to reject everything he stands for as he heads out the door. By trying to straddle a line on using force against Iraq and then Iran, Clinton made it more difficult for them to feel like a vote for her was also an unambiguous rejection of Bushism - however much she differs from Bush in most respects."
   

3. Supporter Passion
   

   "But in a campaign that ran short of money and dragged on for months longer than expected, even without the Obama campaign's innovative channeling of the passion of its supporters, the Clinton campaign's business-as-usual approach to rank-and-file supporters represents a resource squandered. This was crucially about campaign organization and strategy. But watching Clinton's supporters, online and off, it seems to me something deeper happened. As long as Clinton was inevitable, and the establishment candidate, and getting her money from big donors, she didn't ask for her supporters to do much, and they, as passionately as many of them felt about Hillary Clinton as a candidate, did not fully buy into her campaign, did not feel responsibility for it."
   

4. Too Soon a Bulldog
   

   "But for me, the show ended in South Carolina.  It was there that the Clinton campaign took two unfortunate and related turns.  One was a shift away from ideological differences with the Obama campaign, and a turn toward basing her case along demographic lines.  The second was the full emergence of Bill Clinton, bulldog.
   

   In many presidential elections, the vice-presidential candidate often gets that bulldog job.  It's the veep who throws out the tough statements, allowing the presidential candidate to glide along above the controversy.  The veep who says the things that may be below the belt, but which leave doubt in the voter's minds.  This season, Bill Clinton took on that role."  
   

Lookit…

I've been rather critical of the Senator from New York for the whole season, but I must concede the fact that her Concession and Support speech was excellent, giving me hope that this turning point will not be a further turn to the right. I think what she did, ultimately, may help Obama by taking away McCain's most potent weapons against him. It maybe, in the course of time, that though we will speak of President Obama in reverent terms, but know that it was Hillary Clinton who saved the Democratic Party with her tireless championing of her party's candidate, and her unwavering devotion to the cause of us all, and not just its embodiment in a "leader".

The history to be made here (and I think that we may have lost sight of this) is that we, as a country, maybe finally growing up, and now longer acting like a petulant child abroad, and a spoiled, selfish brat at home. Instead, we turn away from the disastrous narcissism of Corporate Conservatism, the sanctimony of the Social Conservatism, and all other bastardized branches of Goldwater's thought, which, reduced to its essence in the virtual personhood of BushCo, is at best Corporatist and, and worst, Semi Fascist. The history was never going to be the gender or ethnicity of the candidate; It was, a priori, always about our Constitution, and its restoration. I hope, really, that all Americans, understand this (and if you don't understand that this needs to be done at all, then…um…well, you probably have already stopped reading).

Summer's Here and the Time is Right…Let's turn this fucker around already!!!