Clinton's 'I'll Be Back' Campaign Finally Ends. No, Really.

Remember the T-1000 from "Terminator 2: Judgment Day"? That's right: the android assassin sent back from the future to kill the young John Connor before he can grow up to lead the post-apocalyptic human race in a resistance battle against its machine overlords. From the way pundits and opponents--a redundancy, to some--have characterized Hillary Clinton's campaign, you'd think the former first lady was some sort of relentless futuristic robot as well.

Call her the T-2008. Made of mimetic liquid metal, the T-1000 could weather a face-splitting blast from a rocket launcher and re-form itself in seconds. Similarly, the T-2008 could place third in Iowa, lose 11 straight contests and slip irrevocably behind in the delegate count--then march onward, her pantsuit unsullied, to win big in New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. So you thought being submerged in freezing liquid nitrogen and shattered into a million pieces would deter the T-1000? Think again, foolish humans. Likewise, not even the end of the Democratic contest, which came when Barack Obama won the 2,118 delegates necessary to clinch the nomination Tuesday night, seemed to deactivate Clinton's neural net processor. "

So it was today, as the once and future senator from New York officially ended her barrier-breaking campaign and endorsed Obama before several thousand disappointed supporters at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. To be honest, I've never bought into the myth of Hillary as some "larger-than-life, freakish figure" desperate for power and determined to win at all costs. Instead, she's always struck me as an uncommonly ambitious wonk--a wonk who shares a born politician's confidence that she can best advance the causes she cares about, but a wonk all the same. Moreover, I've argued for months that Clinton earned the right to compete in every last primary--18 million votes, anyone?--and that her show of stamina would ultimately help, not hurt, the Democratic Party. ("CLINTON HAS NOT YET LEFT, ENDORSEMENT SPEECH DELAYED," read the alarmist ticker----as if Terry McAuliffe, Harold Ickes, Geoff Garin and Bill Clinton were huddled inside, hurriedly rewriting Hillary's remarks at the last minute to announce that she would now campaign as the Bull Moose candidate for president. "Perhaps she's hiding in the bushes," quipped the ever-ungenerous Keith Olbermann. "Your guess is as good as ours."

But after all the guessing games--will her endorsement be enthusiastic enough? will she sound sincere? will she "suspend," or "end," or "withdraw" or "concede"?--Clinton simply strode into the cavernous, neoclassical hall, took the stage and delivered exactly the speech that Obama needed her to deliver. Did she spout Obama's talking points--"hope," "change," "Kansas," "Kenya," "a new kind of politics"--from start to finish? Not so much. In fact, she didn't say a word about why the Illinois senator would make a good president (and for that, I'm sure, her critics will complain). But to achieve her latest goal--party unity--Clinton's best bet is persuasion, not propaganda. Consider her audience: reluctant, mourning supporters who need to be convinced--not commanded--to consider her opponent. At this point, they don't really like Obama, and they definitely don't think Clinton (who just spent 16 months in attack mode) likes him, either. "I have stood on the stage and gone toe-to-toe with him in 22 debates," she said, sounding every inch the begrudgingly respectful rival. "I have had a front row seat to his candidacy, and I have seen his strength and determination, his grace and his grit." Anything more effusive would've seriously strained credulity.

So instead of cheerleading, Clinton empathized. She confessed that she shared her supporters' "disappoint[ment]." She said that her "commitment to you and to the progress we seek is unyielding." She assured them that even though "there are still barriers and biases out there, often unconscious," the "path will be a little easier next time"----an open expression of feminism that she would've avoided as recently as February. And then, having felt their pain, Clinton played the lawyer, presenting a modest, pragmatic case perfectly calibrated to connect with this particular jury: you are Democrats; you care deeply about Democratic issues; and there's only one Democrat left in the race. It was the savviest argument she could make. "The way to continue our fight now – to accomplish the goals for which we stand – is to take our energy, our passion, our strength and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama the next President of the United States," she said. "Think about the lost opportunities of these past seven years – on the environment and the economy, on health care and civil rights, on education, foreign policy and the Supreme Court. Imagine how far we could’ve come, how much we could’ve achieved if we had just had a Democrat in the White House. We cannot let this moment slip away." By the time Clinton declared, at the peak of her peroration, that she "was standing with Senator Obama to say: Yes we can," you actually got the sense that some--not all, but some--of her cheering supporters believed it.

And no, Hillary didn't flatten herself into a thin "carpet" of metal and ooze off of the stage. Those days, it seems, are over--at least until 2012.