Well it seems Hillary is finally going to concede - not today, not tomorrow, not Friday, but on Saturday.
I really hope she gives one hell of a speech because she owes that to Obama, and she certainly has time to write it. She has had the media focused totally on her for 36 hours now, from yesterday morning when it leaked out that she might concede that night, until this evening when she finally was forced to announce that she would concede - after conference calls from Democratic Senators and Representatives. All this media focus took away from the historic victory of Barack Obama, the first ever nomination of an African American for the presidency of the United States.
Everyone knows it's easier to win than to lose, and so we know it was hard for Clinton to admit defeat. But it is even more difficult when you have been living a delusion for months. Ever since Texas and Ohio, when Clinton could not pull off big enough victories to enable her to catch up in delegates, experts have been telling her she did not have the math on her side. It was nearly impossible to win, they said over and over. Yet her supporters, who often accuse Obama supporters of drinking the Kool-Aid, had apparently drunk their own potion, because they would not believe reality.
And thus we read articles like this today, showing just how delusional Clinton's supporters were. Yesterday shouldn't have been the wake up call. That should have happened months ago.
Clinton's supporters also must be disheartened because Hillary had been telling them for months that she was going to convince the superdelegates to be on her side, to give her the nomination even if she was behind Obama in the delegate count. In other words, she was saying she would ignore the will of the people and the rules of the Democratic Party regarding the importance of delegates and rely on party insiders to give her the nomination. Yet now that her plan has backfired and the superdelegates, seeing that he was ahead in delegate count, all ran to Obama on the last day of the primary, she and her supporters are left not only stunned, but convinced they have been robbed.
I have wondered for the duration of this campaign why Hillary has such a hard time playing by the rules, why she attempts to change the rules when she is behind, and why the first serious female presidential candidate in history acts so unsportsmanlike, so contrary to the rules and etiquette of politics, so much like girls and women acted prior to the feminist revolution. And the only answer I can come up with is that she and many of her older supporters never really played team sports. If they had, they would have learned you can't get away with the things she has tried to get away with - not in sports, and not in politics, the greatest sport of all.
Hillary doesn't seem to understand that when you are losing the baseball game at the end of nine full innings, you accept defeat. You don't scream that you closed strong, getting five runs in the last three innings and therefore you should win, even if the other team was ahead by ten runs. You don't insist that the winner should be determined by who got the most hits, not who got the most runs. You don't announce to the crowd at the end of the game that your team has been victorious and that you aren't sure you will accept the results as posted on the scoreboard. And you don't turn your back on a member of the opposing team and refuse to shake hands after they beat you.
If you do those things, one or more of the umpires or some of your teammates will take you aside, introduce you to reality and embarass you in front of an audience. That is what members of the House and Senate did today to Hillary Clinton.
The good news is (although I will only believe it when I actually see and hear it) she has listened to the umpires and her teammates. The bad news is she stepped on a historic moment and she can't take that back.
She has embarassed herself.
