Clinton: No Way, No How, No McCain!

Hillary Clinton: "Whether you voted for me or voted for Barack, the time is now to unite as a party with a single purpose."

[Publisher’s Commentary: Election 2008]

Yesterday Hillary Clinton rallied the troops behind the Democratic Party and Senator Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy with these classic words: “Whether you voted for me or voted for Barack, the time is now to unite as a party with a single purpose.”

For several weeks, Obama supporters –including those who voted for Clinton in the primaries– worried that Clinton holdouts were poised to wreck the Convention in Denver and to sow further seeds of disunity.

Certainly, John McCain, the 73-year-old Republican standard bearer has been trying to exploit some of the simmering resentments that came to the surface among Democrats during the primaries.

McCain has been running advertisements playing up comments made by both Clinton and VP running mate Joseph Biden during the primaries when all the candidates were still attacking each other in competitive elections; both had pointed out that Obama had not been in politics long enough and was not yet ready to be president.

Ironically, any concerns about Obama’s relative youth and inexperience has been allayed since Obama selected Biden, who has 35 years experience in the Senate, as his running mate.

Moreover, McCain will likely face his own nightmare–one of his leading potential running mates, Mitt Romney, during the Republican primaries referred to McCain as an incompetent politician with no clue about how to run the economy. Romney said McCain’s policies would cost the country hundreds of thousands of job losses.

But yesterday, Clinton made it clear that it was time for the Democrats to come together to defeat McCain and the Republicans in November.

Some observers have noted that Clinton, while urging her supporters to back Obama, didn’t explicitly declare that the Illinois senator was ready to be president.

That’s a moot point, for two reasons: Obama is the party’s nominee and Clinton has already called upon people who voted for her to back him; but, the most important signal Clinton wanted to send was that even those who still don’t like Obama and voted for her, should do the right thing. In other words, it wasn’t so much about Obama, but rather Democrats coming together to defeat the Republicans and McCain.

She made her pitch by essentially arguing that the votes cast by her 18 million supporters should not be seen as a personal endorsement of her, but as backing for the policies she advocated–support for universal healthcare, job creations, protecting people from the foreclosures nightmare, protecting the rights of women from a McCain Supreme Court, young men and women in the military service, among many other things.

Now, it was time to transfer those votes for the party’s nominee, Senator Obama.

Clinton said even though McCain was a Senatorial colleague and friend, “we don’t need four more years” of the failed Bush policies.

She threw harsh jabs at McCain: “John McCain doesn’t think that 47 million people without health insurance is a crisis. John McCain wants to privatize Social Security. And in 2008, he still thinks it’s okay when women don’t earn equal pay for equal work.

With an agenda like that, it makes sense that George Bush and John McCain will be together next week in the Twin Cities, Because they’re awfully hard to tell apart.”

“No way, no how, no McCain,” Clinton said.

Tonight, her husband will take the stage to make his pitch.

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