My role in her campaign was as a volunteer advisor. My focus was on older voter issues and strategy. In every primary and caucus, including those where Senator Obama won big, Senator Clinton carried older voters by huge margins.
I like to say that, if we could have raised the voting age to 50, she would have wrapped up the nomination last spring. I'm still getting emails from senior leaders and supporters of Senator Clinton in which they swear that they will either sit out the general election or actually vote for John McCain.
I attended this event hoping that she'd be able to lift me, along with so many of her most fervent supporters, out of our continued funk. Although I have had recent conversations with the Obama campaign about older voters, whom polls show he is losing to SenatorMcCain by double-digit margins, my heart still isn't in it.
I've been asking myself and others who feel the same way: Why is it taking us so long to, in the words of Obama supporters, "get over it?"
Now that it seems certain that Senator Clinton will not be Senator Obama's running mate, I've come to grips with the fact that this Presidential campaign will not include Hillary Clinton's voice and presence front and center. Over the past few months, I?ve missed her being in the daily political news. This void will now last through the general election.
What I'm seeing instead, and what has kept me from enthusiastically supporting Senator Obama thus far, is a replay of the primary/caucus contest. Each day in the give-and-take between the Obama and McCain camps I'm reminded of what had happened in the earlier campaign. From the questions of experience, qualifications, and substance, to the awful alleged playing of the race card, I can't help but see a rerun unfolding.
What concerns me most, however, is the likely outcome. Senator Clinton ran her campaign for the nomination with an astute eye toward the general election. She knew that a Democratic candidate who catered too narrowly to our party's base of activists (of which I'm one) would have a difficult time winning over independent voters, who will decide the election in November.
Unlike Senator Obama, who (as one of Senator Clinton's Texas supporters has noted) has positioned himself as a candidate of transformation and is running essentially on his persona, she took on the mantle of transition and ran more on her policies.
While the Obama coalition was focused more on the affluent and the highly educated, her case was directed largely at middle-class and lower-income voters. In contrast with Senator Obama's appeal to hope as the dominant emotion, hers was to confidence as a more compelling response to the predictable Republican play to fear.
In many ways (as I've written before in a letter published in the May 6th edition of The New York Times), her approach was similar to the Presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy, for whom I worked forty years ago and who still inspires everything I do politically. I believe that her strategy was the right one for a Democratic victory in November.
In a good-faith attempt to feel better about Senator Obama, I went back to his earliest speeches at the start of his candidacy to see what I had missed. I was struck by the not-so-subtle attacks on the Clinton years and his negative portrayal of Senator Clinton's motives that were at the heart of his pitch.
For example, in December 2007 in Des Moines, Iowa, Senator Obama opened his "Our Moment is Now" speech by noting that he was not running for the Presidency to fulfill some long-held ambition or because "I believed it was somehow owed to me." He later added, "But you can't at once argue that you?re the master of a broken system in Washington and offer yourself as the person to change it."
