Clinton concedes and Obama hits the trail

What happened

Declaring that “this isn’t exactly the party I’d planned,” Sen. Hillary Clinton told a crowd of cheering supporters last week that she was ending her historic presidential campaign and throwing her support behind Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking in Washington, D.C., four days after initially refusing to concede that Obama had won the Democratic primary battle, Clinton urged supporters to put aside the bitterness of the long campaign and unite to defeat presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. “Every moment wasted looking back keeps us from moving forward,” she said. But the cheers were mixed with boos whenever Clinton mentioned Obama’s name—a sign that his support among the Hillaryites is far from assured.

Obama immediately kicked off his general election campaign with a focus on economic issues. “We have tried it their way for eight long years, and it has failed,” Obama told a South Carolina audience, zeroing in on McCain’s pledge to extend the Bush administration’s tax cuts. Obama’s aides said that despite the long primary race, most voters still don’t know much about the first-term Illinois senator. So Obama plans to spend less time speaking to large crowds and more time in smaller settings. “He will continue to visit people in their workplaces and spend time with working Americans one-on-one,” said spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

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What the editorials said

Just six months ago, said The Boston Globe, pundits expected Obama to get plastered by an unstoppable Clinton machine. His rise and her concession demonstrate “a desire by voters to transcend what Obama called ‘petty bickering and point scoring’ and to feel moved by politics.” As Obama now goes head-to-head with the eminently respectable McCain, the country can perhaps look forward to a general election every bit as inspiring as the primary that just ended.

There was nothing inspiring about Clinton’s concession speech, said the New York Daily News. In her grudging endorsement, Clinton managed barely “more sincerity than a coerced prisoner of war would have mustered.” Her most memorable line was that thanks to her voters, there are now “18 million cracks” in “that highest, hardest glass ceiling.” That was an unmistakable signal that she thinks she lost because of sexism—which is a disparagement of Obama’s historic achievement.

What the columnists said

Sexism certainly played a part in Clinton’s loss, said Katha Pollitt in the Chicago Tribune, but that’s old news. The question for women now is which candidate, Obama or McCain, will best protect their interests, on issues ranging from reproductive freedom and health care to sexual violence. It’s not even a close call. That’s why Clinton needs “to do the right thing and rally these women to Obama.”

Actually, Obama doesn’t need Clinton’s help, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. One way to look at Obama’s win is that voters didn’t just reject Clinton, they rejected “Clintonism.” Inspired by Obama’s call for a new kind of politics, they “threw off the idea” that the best candidate is necessarily the most ruthless one. If Obama really wants this race to be about his vision for the future, he doesn’t need an artifact of the past campaigning for him, and he certainly doesn’t need her on the ticket.

That’s especially true if Obama wants to increase his appeal to independents and Republicans, said Michael Tomasky in the London Guardian. And his early moves suggest that’s exactly what he’s trying to do. Obama kicked off his general election campaign in North Carolina and Missouri—traditionally Republican stalwarts. Even if Obama can’t carry many red states, by “expanding the map,” he can still force McCain to spend time and money defending GOP turf. Of course, the maverick McCain plans to compete in such traditionally Democratic strongholds as Pennsylvania. The old red/blue divide suddenly is starting to seem passé.

What next?

McCain has proposed joining Obama for 10 “town hall” meetings instead of the typical media-managed debates. At first Obama seemed cool to the idea, but this week he said his aides were negotiating with the McCain campaign to work something out. That’s “a genuinely important development,” said David Broder in The Washington Post. After past debates that turned on “Al Gore sighing or George H.W. Bush glancing at his watch,” voters would relish a chance to see candidates talking directly to each other in a setting where spontaneity at least has a fighting chance.