Having just watched Obama’s non-victory speech in Chicago I found the heart I had been losing just an hour or so before. Watching Hillary claim the states that Democrats traditionally win (NY, New Jersey & Mass) that for a moment or two we thought we might steal away, I thought that maybe the dream was over. The machine that HC had oiled well in advance was paying off for her and Obama was supposed to be crushed by it.
But my man sure didn’t sound crushed. Could it have been those significant wins in Connecticut and Minnesota, with Missouri hanging in the balance, at 12:14 am EST? Those are states the Dems need in a general election and not ones we can take for granted. Maybe he was feeling something that machines can’t feel.
A number of people emailed me the link to will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video yesterday, a musical mash-up of performers like him and John Legend singing and rapping along to Obama’s last non-victory speech, in New Hampshire. It was a heartfelt and handmade tribute that it would be easy to mock if it weren’t for the fact that no campaign paid for it. It was a true labor of love, of hope and optimism.
They’re going to be counting votes in California for many more hours to come and I may wake up to a more decisive Clinton victory there than exit polls are predicting. CNN just declared her the victor with the majority of the delegates — again, a state where she had a twenty point advantage just a few weeks ago. But the fight goes on, between the machine woman (why else did Hillary sound darn wonky and on autopilot in what should have been her impassioned victory speech in NYC tonight?) and the man of heart.
As Carl Bernstein quoted Vernon Jordan (old Clinton friend and benefactor) as saying, “It’s hard to run against a movement.” And as much as the Clintons may wish Obama and all of us behind him would just go away, we won’t. It still comes down to delegates and let’s talk tomorrow when we they have divvied them all up. No one’s going to have enough marbles to go home. We’re still in this and I do mean we. Hillary, who I really don’t mean to demonize, seems to think she is here to save us if we would just give her the chance. Obama seems to suggest we could save ourselves from four or eight more years of endless bickering bullshit, if we believe we can. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” he said tonight. And now we are here.