It wasn’t Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid who did Hillary Clinton in. It wasn’t the Obama campaign who bludgeoned her into submission. It wasn’t the TV talking heads who would have loved nothing better than to pontificate about the Great Divide between the forces of Darkness and Lightness in the Democratic party all Summer. Certainly John McCain of the Green Screen would have been thrilled to see this farce play out until August.
No, the irony of Hillary Clinton’s concession or campaign suspension or endorsement of/capitulation to the inevitability of Obama’s victory is that it was her own people who stuck in the knife and twisted it. Here’s how Keith Olbermann reported it last night on MsNBC’s Countdown:
To recap the breaking news… our own Howard Fineman of Newsweek magazine reporting tonight that Senator Clinton will exit the Democratic race on Friday and endorse Senator Obama… He reports eight Clinton supporters in the Senate, encouraged by Clinton advisers, called her en masse today and said she must go… This following NBC’s Andrea Mitchell’s report that 23 members of Congress, convened by phone to tell Senator Clinton the same thing.
It was her own staff members, and supporters in the House and Senate who finally spoke the word she never wanted to hear, and couldn’t force herself to accept: It’s over. And all the ranting and raving at places like No Quarter about Obama’s alleged criminal connections to Tony Rezko, or Michelle’s “Whitey” tape, or William Ayers, lefty terrorist extraordinaire in the Obama dirty laundry hamper, isn’t going to change that. Obama is going to be the nominee. Clinton is not going to be the Vice president. Obama may help her with her campaign debt, he may offer her some position in his cabinet, but she is not getting on the ticket, in either first or second place.
And it took her own senior staff and staunchest supporters to finally make her realize that. How sad that in the end, it wasn’t some grand conspiracy by the DNC or Obama or the media to deny her her victory, it was simply her closest friends and advisers finally, forcefully telling her the truth that she lost. It had to have come as a shock to her and a bitter pill to swallow.
But at least now we know that it wasn’t the fat lady who sang to bring down the curtain on her presidential aspirations. It was Charley Rangel. And Chuck Schumer. And in all likelihood Howard Wolfson and Harold Ickes, and maybe even that grandest of political buffoons this year, Terry McAuliffe.
In short, it was her own people who kneecapped her. How ironic.