Well, watching it, I thought it was magnificent and I don’t like Hillary.
But now after reading the Guardian’s assessment, I’m concerned and thinking, well, yeah, and there has always been a reason I didn’t like Hillary…. It was a speech that the general public would accept as a ringing call to party unity but that her own core supporters would find inadequate, and I find it scary that she may be more concerned with setting up her next run for office (if Obama loses) than securing the nation from four more years of horror and disaster.
Excerpts from the article:
I strove to watch this thing from the point of view of one of her supporters – the one in five of her primary-season voters – who not only did not vote for but actively does not like Barack Obama. Who are these people?
They may be immature politically. And they are. I have made my views on that clear. But they aren’t stupid. They know John McCain has pledged to put anti-abortion judges on the bench. They know John McCain has moved to the right on taxes and drilling and loads of things. They are well aware of all the logical and rational reasons that they shouldn’t be flirting with voting for John McCain, but they’re thinking about it anyway.
and…
Second, she didn’t say anything about Obama’s ability as commander-in-chief. I’d argue she was under a special obligation to do this, at the very moment when McCain is running an ad using her famous quote from February in which she said that she and McCain brought a lifetime of experience to the job of leading America in the world, while Obama had a speech he gave in 2002. I honestly thought that she would reference that ad specifically and say something like, “Well, I’m Hillary Clinton, and I do not approve that message.”
Imagine the applause. But she left all that hanging. And indeed the statement the McCain campaign issued immediately after the speech drove this point home, pointing out that Clinton had said nothing about Obama’s ability to be the commander-in-chief. And I have to think the omission was conscious.
I’ve said to friends that I was gratified at her unifying speech but was waiting to see if her actions in the coming weeks are as unifying. Now I’m even wondering if I missed the subtext of her speech.
Illuminate me.
