Sherry Chandler

Here is the full text of Hillary Clinton’s speech today, in which she thanked her supporters and endorsed Barack Obama.

It was an excellent speech that made it amply clear why so many people have voted for her this year.

Some clips are floating around but they only pull out the endorsement. I think you need to watch or read the whole thing, not the sound bite.

It was more than just a necessary endorsement of Barack Obama, though it contained that. It was a statement of principle. It was a concession, but there was not much of defeat in it.

To describe it, I yield to one more eloquent than I, Big Tent Democrat:

Hillary Clinton did something that is very difficult in my opinion, she made a great speech out of a concession endorsement speech. Why?

Because she conceded nothing on the issues nor in any way discounted what she and her supporters accomplished. And then she endorsed him, but the endorsement was not the standard stump endorsement. It was an intelligent, rational, respectful argument to her supporters for why she was endorsing Barack Obama. she would speak to the issues and punctuate her line with “and that is why we must elect Barack Obama President.”

She then recognized the historic nature of this election. As I wrote last Tuesday night, while a dream was realized when the Democratic Party nominated an African American as our Presidential candidate, a dream was thwarted also, that of a woman nominee. Hillary Clinton honored BOTH moments in this speech.

It was one of the best speeches I have ever seen.

I watched it on CSPAN, which I hear will re-run it later today.

Thanks to JimT:

Read also Rebecca Traister: Hillary’s Final Curtain

These national discussions just keep coming at us, don’t they?

Clinton Bloc Becomes the Prize for Election Day (I supply emphasis):

…Even the Democratic National Committee chairman is avidly trying to make up for accusations that he allowed sexism in the race to pass unchallenged.

“The wounds of sexism need to be the subject of a national discussion,” the chairman, Howard Dean, said in an interview. “Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers” toward Mrs. Clinton.

…

Former Gov. Madeleine M. Kunin of Vermont suggested in an interview that Mr. Obama promise to appoint women to half his cabinet positions.

Ms. Steinem advised that Mr. Obama deliver the same sort of ambitious speech about sex that he did on race. An aide said the campaign was considering such an address.

Jenny Backus, a Democratic consultant unaffiliated with either campaign, wondered whether Mr. Obama might give Chelsea Clinton a prominent role in his efforts.

When Mr. Dean reached out to Cynthia Ruccia, who started an organization of female Clinton swing-state voters threatening to vote for Mr. McCain, Ms. Ruccia asked that the Democratic convention include a symbolic first ballot for Mrs. Clinton’s delegates. Mr. Dean discouraged the idea on the grounds of unity.

He has belatedly recognized the cries of sexism, Mr. Dean said, particularly when a friend showed him a video compilation of broadcasters’ comments about Mrs. Clinton.

“We all get over it when our candidates don’t win,” he said. “What you don’t get over is feeling like you’ve been insulted by some of the leading institutions in America and no one said anything about it.”

…

The Obama campaign will fight back, after waiting a respectful beat or two. In conversations with Mr. Obama and his aides, “I’ve tried to make sure that everyone understood that these women have a right to feel frustrated and angry,” said Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, an important ally who is one of his leading emissaries to women. “To try to make that less than real is a huge mistake.”

As he declared himself the nominee on Tuesday, Mr. Obama cut a particularly woman-friendly figure on stage, dedicating his speech to his grandmother and affectionately bumping fists with his wife, Michelle.

Indeed, descriptions of those women, along with his mother and daughters, will be regular features of Mr. Obama’s speeches, Ms. Sebelius said. Women will ultimately choose Mr. Obama not because of symbolic overtures, she added, but because of his stances on health care, the economy and education, areas where his positions closely resemble Mrs. Clinton’s.

The key, Ms. McCaskill said, is approaching Mrs. Clinton’s supporters with utmost humility. And, Ms. Backus added, that is not always the strongest suit of the young people who are some of Mr. Obama’s most enthusiastic supporters.

“Not nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh,” Ms. McCaskill said, making a taunting sound. “We need them very, very badly, and we shouldn’t be able to be afraid to say that we need them.”

H/t Big Tent Democrat

But they didn’t need us last week. Weren’t too worried about those adolescent commentators then either.

I wonder how many women are going to see this sort of Damascus Road conversion as conveniently timed? Sort of an “I’m sorry honey. I’ll never do it again.”

They might want to polish up that humble rhetoric too. To quote Paul Lukasiak, “these women have a right to feel frustrated and angry” is not the same as “women have a reason to be angry.”

While I’m not a woman, this “right to be” language is the equivalent of an “I’m sorry that you were offended”, faux-apology — its a failure to acknowledge that the anger is legitimate, and that its not just the media that is at fault, but the candidate and the party itself.

Paul thinks this is all misdirection to distract us from the corruption of the DNC.

And, after all, it is not just women who voted for Senator Clinton over Senator Obama. There’s the question of the “Appalachia problem.”

Speaking of Appalachia, I still want policy specifics. In Bristol, Virginia on Thursday, Senator Obama got an enthusiastic response to promises that he’d provide everybody with health care but he didn’t say how he plans to do that.

Gail Collins is relatively clear-eyed about what Clinton accomplished:

Here’s where the sexism does come in. If Barack had failed in his attempt to make history by becoming the first African-American presidential nominee, you can bet we’d have treated his defeat with the dignity it deserved. Even if he went over the deep end at the finale and found it hard to get around to a graceful concession. [Ed. note: I wish people would get over this meme. The timing of Clinton's concession is well within the tradition and will be perfectly graceful. See Anglachel.]

For a long time, Obama supporters have seen party unity as something that Hillary could provide by capitulating. It also requires the Democrats to acknowledge what she’s achieved. If that makes them feel like wimps, let them take it out on John McCain.

…

Over the past months, Clinton has seemed haunted by the image of the “nice girl” who gives up the fight because she’s afraid the boys will be angry if they don’t get their way. She told people she would never, ever say: “I’m the girl, I give up.” She would never let her daughter, or anybody else’s daughter, think that she quit because things got too tough.

And she never did. Nobody is ever again going to question whether it’s possible for a woman to go toe-to-toe with the toughest male candidate in a race for president of the United States. Or whether a woman could be strong enough to serve as commander in chief.

Her campaign didn’t resolve whether a woman who seems tough enough to run the military can also seem likable enough to get elected. But she helped pave the way. So many battles against prejudice are won when people get used to seeing women and minorities in roles that only white men had held before. By the end of those 54 primaries and caucuses, Hillary had made a woman running for president seem normal.

…

For all her vaunting ambition, she was never a candidate who ran for president just because it’s the presidency. She thought about winning in terms of the things she could accomplish, and she never forgot the women’s issues she had championed all her life — repair of the social safety net, children’s rights, support for working mothers.

It’s not the same as winning the White House. But it’s a lot.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was famously tried for sodomy, convicted, and sentenced to two years at hard labor. He just as famously refused to flee England and escape the sentence that killed him. Peter Gay, in Modernism, asks why? And what did it mean for Modernism, of which Wilde was so vocal an advocate:

That art for art’s sake had originated in France did not make it any more acceptable to those not fortunate enough to be French. But in the end it is significant that Yeats, that powerful modernist poet, wanted Wilde to stay and face his accusers. That self-sacrifice, Yeats believed, did much for Wilde’s reputation: “he owes to that decision half of his renown.” This is not very convincing. Wilde’s lasting fame rests on his writings, far more than on his willingness to accept suffering he could have escaped. But Yeats had a point: the stake of avant-garde thinking in Wilde’s history was considerable. Granted, his martyrdom, like many martyrdoms, was largely in vain. Neither the autonomy of art nor the sovereignty of the artist was much advanced by it. But Wilde’s consistent aestheticism, his courage to be pilloried as an eccentric, became a wry kind of model for a few choice spirits who would carry their defiant modernist individualism into the twentieth century.

Wilde died, significantly enough in this context, in 1900.

And Robert Peake, if you read here, you should know that over time I have reconsidered my opinion of Stephen Fry’s portrayal of Wilde. He did rather sigh a lot, and whine. It was my affection for Fry clouding my judgment, I think.

And yet, I find when I picture Mr. Wilde in my mind these days he often seems to wear Mr. Fry’s rather distinctive physiognomy.

A poem from Mr. Wilde:

Impression du Matin

THE Thames nocturne of blue and gold
Changed to a Harmony in grey:
A barge with ochre-coloured hay
Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold

The yellow fog came creeping down
The bridges, till the houses’ walls
Seemed changed to shadows, and S. Paul’s
Loomed like a bubble o’er the town.

Then suddenly arose the clang
Of waking life; the streets were stirred
With country waggons: and a bird
Flew to the glistening roofs and sang.

But one pale woman all alone,
The daylight kissing her wan hair,
Loitered beneath the gas lamps’ flare,
With lips of flame and heart of stone

— Oscar Wilde, from Poetry, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford Univ Press, 1997)

____________
Note: The French title strikes me as a little precious but the poem itself is effective, if a bit romantic. Isobel Murray, in her introduction to the Oxford edition of Wilde’s Complete Poetry, says

Wilde the poet is rarely a metropolitan sophisticate: when he is, the metropolis has a flavour of Paris, rather than London.

Certainly true of this poem, which as it turns out is one that Murray singles out as being particularly Parisian in mood. Though the poem describes London, it is a London that sounds a lot like an impressionist painting of Paris. To me, anyway.

A certain irony in Oxford putting out a complete Oscar Wilde because the Oxford dons in their wisdom refused the gift of Wilde’s only volume of verse, Poems, that he self-published in 1881. Plagiarism was their cry, an accusation that followed this volume down into the late 20th Century, when critics decided to redefine it as “echoing.”

Certainly Wilde himself never apologized or acted in the least guilty about his verse. In a typical Wildean gesture, he is said to have used this “attractively” published volume as a variety of visiting card, especially in France.