Hillary should get out of history's way - Marcus Gee - The Globe & Mail

Until Tuesday night, it was hard not to feel a bit sad about the end of Hillary Clinton's run for the Democratic presidential nomination. She was, after all, the first woman to have a serious shot at the most powerful job in the world. In her campaign, she showed remarkable poise, stamina, intelligence and toughness - proof, if anybody still needed it, that a woman is just as fit as a man for the top job.

Then came her speech at Baruch College in New York. As she rose to speak, history was in the air. This was the day that Barack Obama finally sewed up the Democratic nomination, passing the magic number of committed delegates (2,118) needed to defeat Senator Clinton.

Never before had a major political party nominated a black man for the presidency, a moment heralded by headlines around the world.

It was obvious what she had to do: Concede; admit that she had lost; praise her rival's qualities; acknowledge the epochal nature of his achievement. Instead, she delivered an astonishingly graceless non-concession speech that made it sound as if she was still fighting on against the arithmetic. While saying that it had been an "honour" to run against Mr. Obama and thanking him for having "inspired so many Americans to care about politics," she could not bring herself to say that he had won.

To the contrary, she praised her supporters for asking themselves "who will be the strongest candidate and ... who will be ready to take back the White House and take charge as commander-in-chief and lead our country to better tomorrows?" (Implicit answer: her). Reminding them of her claim to be the more electable candidate in November's election, she recalled how "we won, together, the swing states necessary to get to 270 electoral votes." So here she was, on the very day of Mr. Obama's historic victory, getting more digs in about his faults and her virtues.

Sympathizers are already trying to explain away the Baruch speech. Hillary Clinton is a proud woman and she has come a long way. She hates to disappoint all the people who have worked so hard for her. She will concede properly when the time is right, probably tomorrow, and then work hard to get Mr. Obama elected and the party united again.

But there is more to it than that. Senator Clinton is clearly jockeying for something - perhaps the vice-presidential spot on the Democratic ticket; at the very least, a powerful position in the cabinet or the power structure.

If she wants to be helpful to her party, she has an odd way of showing it. She has spent the past several months telling Americans that Mr. Obama lacks the experience and the gravitas to lead the country, that he is all eloquence and no substance. Now she wants to be No. 2 on his team?

Mr. Obama would be foolish to put her on the presidential ticket now. It would look as if he were succumbing to a Clinton power play. It would underline the fact that he won the nomination only narrowly, and then only after a heck of a fight.

Democrats voted for Mr. Obama because they liked his message of change. Ms. Clinton lost, at least in part, because, as a former first lady and arch Washington insider, she represented continuity - a fact the boorish interventions of her husband only served to punctuate. As the prohibitive front-runner for so many months, she was taken aback by the surge of excitement over Mr. Obama's candidacy and reacted by going negative. She stayed in the race long after it was clear that she could not win, and in the process exacerbated the divisions in her party.

Supporters put that down to her pluck, and she has plenty of that. But there is also more than a little ego - a sense that she, and only she, has the knowledge and the smarts to do the job. Wrapped in that Clintonesque shawl of righteousness, she failed to see that something really big was happening. As exciting as it would be to make history by nominating a woman, Democrats found the idea of nominating a black man even more so. With his great eloquence, his empathy and his potential as a bridge over the great racial divide, Mr. Obama is a candidate for the ages.

While she recalls the past, he promises to make history. It is time for her to step aside and let him get on with it.