Clinton's speech won't placate women. They're angry because
there's no other female presidential candidate in the wings
What is it that Hillary Clinton's supporters most wanted? Was it Hillary herself? Was it a Democratic ideal? Or was it a female president?
Today, most pundits are championing her olive branch to the Obama campaign, her heroic bowing out toward party unity. We'll say that her most important line - "Were you in this campaign just for me?" – was meant to gently nudge her supporters to recognise the greater good.
But the problem is so-called Puma types [Party United My Ass] and hardcore Hillary fans are angry, not just because their candidate didn't win, but because there are so few other viable women presidential candidates on the horizon. And Clinton didn't do enough to assuage that anger.
Perhaps Clinton should have addressed some of the major issues that divide the parties even more aggressively than she did.
That would have meant more about abortion (note that she didn't talk about the party's pro-choice positioning), more on embracing the country's history of immigration in positive terms, more on anti-isolationist foreign policy, more on Obama's ability to be a stellar commander-in-chief.
And every time she said those things, and this should have held true for even what she did say last night, she needed to couple every "I" in the same breath as "Obama".
As in, instead of saying "I ran for president to renew the promise of America."
She might have said, "Like Obama, I ran for president to renew the promise of America, and now all of you who believe in that promise should support him, as I do."
But beyond all that, Clinton missed an opportunity to link the two most important civil rights struggles in American history - civil rights and women's rights - in a mutually reinforcing way to get past the bitter pill women's rights advocates feel is being forced down their throat.
The tension between the women's movement and the African-American civil rights movement is unfortunately nearly as old as both.
A handshake from one side to the other, a recognition that these struggles have both needed each other and benefited from each other's successes might have gone a long way in giving the Puma democrats a reason to come around to the Obama camp.
Some women will say they have spent too much time, their mothers spent too much time, their grandmothers and great-grandmothers spent too much time, stepping aside for other movements.
But this is a mistake. This is the greater tension I think, the catharsis that goes beyond a question of Obama and Clinton themselves.
To British readers, some of this might seem a bit ridiculous. But while our two countries gave women the right to vote at approximately the same moment nearly 90 years ago, since then we've diverged wildly on women's representation in government. This means the wound of Clinton's loss festers ever deeper, refusing to heal.
In the UK you've not only had a woman lead your country but you have a far greater pool of women politicians to draw from. You're no Scandinavia, but one in five members of Parliament are women.
Contrast that to the US. In the pipeline, things aren't looking as good as they should in 2008.
We've only 16 women senators out of 100, 74 female representatives out of 435 and eight women governors out of 50 (this year is an exception, normally we draw our presidential candidates from governors' mansions).
Partly as a result of America's continued inability to create affordable childcare options for women, our parties have been unable to woo substantial numbers of women into running for higher office.
Granted, groups like Emily's List have done an admirable job in electing women (pro-choice women in particular), but the next viable female presidential nominee is … Hillary Clinton in 2012?
This is a problem. And this, I suspect is why the Pumas are really angry. They saw Clinton as their only shot.
But they've got their anger misplaced. They should be focused on nurturing other women, the next generation as well as Clinton's, so that they never again find the playing field so bleakly unequal, the future so blankly, uniformly male.
Leading up to Hillary Clinton's Democratic convention speech on Tuesday night, there was what could be charitably described as a wee bit of pressure being put on her by the talking heads in America's Cable News Land, who carefully laid out their perfectly reasonable expectations:
Clinton was to unify the party; she was to make a strong case for an Obama presidency; she was to obliterate McCain; she was to honour her supporters.
She was to be deferential, but strong; she was to be gracious; she was to be supportive; she was to be persuasive; she was to be authentic; she was to be witty; and she was, above all, to be flawless.
Because anything less than all of the above, perfectly executed, would be deemed a disaster.
Hours before showtime, I found myself captivated by the ringleaders at cable news channel MSNBC:
David Gregory and Keith Olbermann, wearing their politically non-committal purple ties, and Chris Matthews, looking like he'd escaped from an asylum, his mad, windblown hair and the evident dearth of combs in the whole of Denver lending an even more maniacal air to his usual madcap blathering.
Only Hillary and Bill Clinton can quiet their supporters and unite the party, intoned Gregory sagely, during a Very Serious Discussion about whether the Clintons would try to "make the convention about them" or support Obama.
As if it was seriously conceivable that two of the most resolutely partisan Democrats in the nation would try to hijack a party convention in a totally illogical play for legacy.
The surreality did not stop there, as every new hypothetical, every flourish, seemed pulled from a parallel dimension.
There were implications that Clinton was making last-minute refinements to her speech just to keep it from being properly vetted; "It's hard to harmonize when you don't know the tune," Matthews said, more than once.
Joe Scarborough jumped in to wonder what "got the Obamas and Clintons together" over the past few days, as if there haven't been, for weeks, disavowals from both camps that negotiations were tense or rife with animus, as if the narrative of disunity were not a wholesale media creation from the get-go.
And then the coup de grace, as Olbermann noted that "people have questioned what Senator Clinton's motives might be going into this speech," then pondered, sincerely:
"Is it possible, and I know in this cynical year it seems almost silly to ask this question, but is it just not possible that she could genuinely believe that the nation can't sustain itself with another four years of Republican rule and that that's the motivation going into tonight's speech for her?"
This is what it had come to at last – the possibility that Clinton has integrity was being discussed like the remotest possibility in the multiverse, something "silly" to consider, the idea that Clinton is motivated primarily by not wanting Republicans to win presented as the zaniest outlier of all conceivable motivations.
It was, perhaps, too much to expect that reason could penetrate the MSNBC bubble inside which Olbermann is cloistered – and supporting evidence for the void of said reason soon presented itself in the gruesome spectre of Pat Buchanan.
Why is he still considered an appropriate national commentator, despite the fact that he should long ago have been relegated to the dustbin of history, unfit to comment on bullfrog racing, no less the Democratic convention?
When we catch up with the manic Matthews again, he is in full meltdown, barking at Clinton supporter Lisa Caputo questions about how the Clintons are going to win the White House back for the Clinton family.
Caputo laughs at his suggestion that the Clintons have a "restoration plan" to recapture the White House. "I'm SERIOUS," he insists. Yes, that's precisely the problem, you crazy, crazy man.
Shortly thereafter, while Matthews engages Chuck Todd in more ZOMG Clinton Apocalypse chatter, MSNBC puts up one of the most laughably ridiculous graphics I have ever seen.
The narrative, of course, as it has been all evening, is that Clinton's wild-eyed, rogue supporters are going to defect and vote for McCain in large numbers.
The graphic that goes up is labeled, approximately, "Clinton Supporters Who Don't Support Obama," and shows that 50% of them have an unfavorable view of Obama and "only" 24% of them have an unfavorable view of McCain.
Naturally, we're not meant to notice that this is only among Clinton supporters who don't support Obama – we're meant instead to infer that there's a possibility that fully 50% of all of Clinton's supporters won't vote for Obama.
This is beyond a joke. This is dishonest hoodwinkery in service of a bullshit narrative.