My favorite part of Hillary Clinton's speech last night was when she admonished her followers not to put their affection for her over the issues. When she reminded them that what's at stake is far more crucial than their loyalty to her. When she reproved them for thinking for even a moment that her historic thrilling campaign was more important than the real campaign to defeat the Republicans.
Where any of her followers could have gotten the idea doesn't seem to have crossed her mind. The fish stinks from the head down. The Clintons' narcissism (and yes, I know, it's an overused term but if there was ever a moment for it in our national life, this is it) perfumed every bit of Hillary's campaign, and it leaked down to her contributors and followers. "Were you in it for me?" was her funniest line of the night.
In this morning's Times there's a piece about the Hillraisers, the people who raised over $300,000 for Hillary, many of whom are apparently bitter and angry that they were not given rooms in the Denver Ritz-Carlton, as the early Obama fundraisers were. They are so mad, according to the Times, that some of them are flying home today and deliberately missing Obama's speech on Thursday. (If you're not nice to me I'm just going to take my private plane and go home.) These are people who, may I remind you, were thinking about their Cabinet and sub-Cabinet positions, who were dreaming of Ambassadorships, who were on the verge of looking at houses in Georgetown. They're miserable. They lost. They were wrong. They're worth millions, or in some cases, billions, and they're not used to being wrong, much less to paying a price for being wrong, and they can't stand it. There's an expression for this -- narcissistic mortification -- and you can smell it all the way from Denver.
My other favorite thing about Hillary's speech is that she wrapped herself up in Seneca Falls, and my God Harriet Tubman, even Harriet Tubman, and yet somehow she never once referred to Roe vs. Wade. She never once mentioned choice. She never once said the truth, which is that any Hillary supporter who doesn't understand that this issue alone is the reason to vote for Obama has no business pretending to be a Democrat. I realize that sounds as if I'm admonishing her, but I caught the admonishment bug last night and this blog is an attempt to shake it off.