End of the Beginning

By BJ Bjornson

Today, Barack Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee for President. Hillary is . . . taking a deep breath before any decisions are made.

She wasn't exactly conciliatory, but in my opinion not entirely flame-worthy. (An opinion my co-bloggers apparently don't agree with.) I commented somewhere that tonight's speech was going to leave people grumbling. I certainly wasn't wrong there.

Early Tuesday, Mark Halperin wrote about a number of things both candidates were underestimating. For Obama, the number one thing was this:

The intensely loyal feelings many of Clinton�s supporters have about her � and the intensely negative feelings they have about him.

I don't know if Obama truly underestimates this, but I'm pretty sure many of his supporters do. For the most part, I don't think many of them can even understand it. Over the last few months, I have taken frequent strolls through the comments section of Talkleft, Corrente, and a few other clearly pro-Clinton blogs. There, even more than in the posts themselves, I see an alternate reality that I simply don't recognize from what I've seen and experienced over the last six months.

And from this post, I know I'm not alone, but that there may be more to the story than I can understand.

For the life of me ,I simply cannot see this rampant, bludgeoning sexism that Ferraro and her ilk keep spewing about. Sexist incidents, yes. Sexist columnists and sexist commentators and some idiot with a shirt - yes. But some kind of wholesale, bloodthirsty sexist take down of Clinton? No. One condoned, snickeringly, by Obama and his crew? No, no, no. (And I won't even address Ferraro's laughable charge that white working-class folks can't relate to Obama and his wife because of their education but somehow can relate to Bill and Hillary, who apparently attended community college on 4-H scholarships. As far as I know.) And so, not seeing it, my inclination is to brush the dirt off my shoulders and say to Ferraro and all those other Angry White Women out there: Get a frickin' grip.

What stops me is only this: Too often I have stood in that painful place where all around you people (white people, mostly, in my case) insist that your interpretation of your own experience is incorrect. You're too sensitive, you're overreacting, yeah, that's what I said, but it's not what I meant, you just don't understand. I know as well as anyone that just because a huge and particular swath of humanity does not "see" something doesn't mean it does not exist. As Tim Wise points out, in this point-by-point essay on white denial, even in the early 1960s�a time at which America still operated under homegrown apartheid�most white Americans insisted racism did not exist or was not a major factor in the lives of black folks. Gallup polls show that nearly two-thirds claimed to believe blacks were treated the same as whites in their communities, while 85 percent said black children had just as good a chance as white children to get a good education.

The power of human beings to block out what they do not wish to see is astonishing.

I can't argue with that. So while I don't see or understand much of the narrative expressed by the die-hard Clinton supporters, I don't discount the power such a narrative has. It won't be easy to bring them back into the fold precisely because the narrative they've experienced is often diametrically opposed to the narrative Obama's supporters have.

For all that, I'm agreeing with BooMan:

I'm willing to be reconciled, but I am not willing to stop fighting until I see a white flag and an acknowledgment that Barack Obama won this contest fair and square and according to the rules. When I see Hillary Clinton stand up and admit that she lost and that Obama's victory is 100% legitimate, then I will stop fighting back. I hope to see it soon. And then, I hope, the Clinton supporters in the Blogosphere will stop peddling in hate and unsubstantiated innuendo. We all understand hardball tactics, even if we don't always respect them. But this contest is coming to a close. And anyone that keeps up the fight against Obama after today is working for McCain. And that includes Hillary Clinton.

And fellow Canuck Prole puts it far blunter.

The important thing right now though, is that Obama has won, and while it has been a bruising campaign, how and why he won bodes well for the fall.

Looking back, he won first and foremost because he knows how to look ahead. Neil Sinhababu pointed it out about his Iraq speech in 2002. It wasn't just that he came down on the right side of the Iraq debate when it was politically unpopular to do so, it's that he clearly foresaw the major problems with it. It was this foresight, along with Clinton's refusal to acknowledge her poor judgement on the issue, that gave Obama the opening he needed to topple her in the first place.

From there, it was Obama who had the right plan to win, by knowing and using the party delegate rules to ensure he would come out on top. Again it was foresight, combined with extensive planning, that allowed him to succeed.

And of course, there was his ability to inspire and get his message across, and to damp down controversies when they reared their heads. Great speeches form politicians these days are rare. For Obama, they're almost the norm. From tonight's examples, it looks like that skill will hold him in good stead for the contest against McCain. Head-to-head, Obama does quite well.

Of course, Hillary is already giving the McCain campaign a hand. It should prove interesting to see how she walks this kind of stuff back, if she ever does.