It ain’t over, til it’s over. It ain’t over til the fat lady sings. Losing is for losers. Quitters never win. You can knock me down, but you can’t count me out.
There are so many cliches and positive idioms in American English reflecting the value we place on underdogs and tenacity. There is, however, just one to my knowledge that suggests how to accept defeat.
Don’t be a sore loser.
It’s the sort of thing a parent says to a child. It’s quaint, often meant to smooth ruffled feathers after a game with family or friends. And yet, it also imparts a bit of the strategic wisdom reflected in the saying ‘Live to fight another day’ and the harmony of the Golden Rule ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’
Everyone loves a winner. Of course we do, but we also recognize that every winner was once and will again be a loser. Winning and losing, and being able to adequately deal with both, are necessary parts of adult human life. We all know this, and this inevitably colors our understanding of Hillary Clinton’s nonconcession speech last night.
Given that, is the chorus of voices ushering her off-stage singing a song of misogyny?
But even as Obama was trying to savor, Hillary was refusing to sever. Ignoring the attempts of Obama and his surrogates to graciously say how “extraordinary” she was as they showed her the exit, she and a self-pitying Bill continued to pull focus. Outside Baruch College, where she was to speak, her fierce feminist supporters screamed “Denver! Denver! Denver!”
Even as Obama got ready to come out on stage for his victory party, the Clinton campaign announced that it had won a Wyoming superdelegate and Terry McAuliffe introduced her at Baruch as “the next president of the United States.” She gave a brief nod to Obama without conceding that he was the nominee before rushing through a variation on her stump speech. She clung to her fuzzy math about winning the popular vote, and in one last fudge she said: “Thanks so much to South Dakota. You had the last word” — even though the Montana polls still had 25 minutes to go.
“What does Hillary want?” she mused, in her most self-aware moment in some time. “I will be making no decisions tonight,” she concluded, asking fans to go to her Web site to share their thoughts.
It’s from Maureen Dowd — no Clinton fan, but certainly no misogynist either. Here’s another from Dahlia Lithwick at Slate.
Unfortunately, I kept thinking of that Gilligan’s Island episode in which Ginger acts out an excruciatingly long and melodramatic death scene. You keep thinking her every last gasp is really it. But then she keeps rolling around and twitching because she’s been peeking through her fingers all along and knows you’re still watching
And another from Hilary Rosen, a staunch Clinton supporter throughout the primary season:
So, I am also so very disappointed at how she has handled this last week. I know she is exhausted and she had pledged to finish the primaries and let every state vote before any final action. But by the time she got on that podium last night, she knew it was over and that she had lost. I am sure I was not alone in privately urging the campaign over the last two weeks to use the moment to take her due, pass the torch and cement her grace. She had an opportunity to soar and unite. She had a chance to surprise her party and the nation after the day-long denials about expecting any concession and send Obama off on the campaign trail of the general election with the best possible platform. I wrote before how she had a chance for her “Al Gore moment.” And if she had done so, the whole country ALL would be talking today about how great she is and give her her due.
Instead she left her supporters empty, Obama’s angry and party leaders trashing her. She said she was stepping back to think about her options. She is waiting to figure out how she would “use” her 18 million voters.
But not my vote. I will enthusiastically support Barack Obama’s campaign. Because I am not a bargaining chip. I am a Democrat.
Sometimes, the issue isn’t gender or race or age. Sometimes, it really is about the person. Many people have told me that they wish that any other woman had run for President. They say that they often wish that an independently successful woman would’ve run, not someone on the coattails of her husband. While Hillary has enormous personal accomplishments in her own right, she owes her political status to her husband.
At the end of this process, all the world can see that she ran well and strongly. There can be no doubt that she is a leader and a fighter. And, all the world can see that she has now lost. For that reason, Op-Eds and articles like this will continue until she leaves.
But the Clintons know no shame, and more importantly, there has been no referee who could end this game, no one who could say to a Clinton, “Enough now.” Well, Democrats have to say it. Now. Enough.
I really wanted to write a happy piece tonight. I wanted to write about Obama’s amazing victory and about Clinton’s tenacity being finally tempered by an acceptance of reality – reality that she’d lost and reality that, while there are indeed good arguments for her being on the ticket, the person who won the nominee has the right to choose the running mate.
Obama, after a slowish start, ended up giving a good, fiery speech aimed at John McCain. And McCain’s speech, though flat in delivery, laid out his themes reasonably well. A race between these two men will be a race between two people who – whatever you think of their politics – are presenting substantive cases to the country and asking the people to choose. That’s going to be a good show. But someone has to send that sore loser on the sidelines off to the showers once and for all.
