Apparently some of you were offended by the fact that I teared up during Hillary Clinton's speech yesterday. For the record, I didn't tear up over Big Brown's loss in the Belmont Stakes, though maybe that's because good old reliable Time Warner chose to kill off cable to the entire Upper West Side of Manhattan just in time for the big race -- clearly their way of saying "Cheney you'' to one of Hillary's key support strongholds. Or something.
And yes, I'm aware that MSNBC fielded female pundits on the speech. But not before the men had had their say. They came after the jump, as we say. But I digress.
What choked me up watching Clinton bow out was the wave of what-might-have-been that overcame me in the moment. It's not her fault.
Well OK, yeah, it is. Like many of her supporters, at least those in my cohort, I've spent the years since her election to the Senate waiting for HRC's better angels to take over. Sometimes they were so close at hand you could almost see the idealistic Rodham girl with dark hair and nerdy glasses pounding at the bars on the cage Hillary Clinton imprisoned her in to keep her at bay as she kept her appointments with destiny.
As an unreconstructed peacenik, I loathed her pandering on Iraq and her inability to reveal any evidence of a conscience. Yet I continued to believe that a conscience was there and would eventually show itself. Naïve? For sure.
But I think I was not alone in this, just as I was not alone in feeling over the last 17 months that she navigated almost every debate, especially with Obama -- who most closely paralleled her worldview and so was her most formidable opponent -- with a combined wonky breadth of knowledge and command of the podium that conveyed the sense of someone who knew, or at least had finally learned, how to take control.
I hope Barack Obama has both the fire in the belly and the intestinal fortitude to cruise through the test that's only just beginning. I hope that, in contrast with Hillary Clinton, Obama manages to keep his better angels out there, in view for all to see no matter how much mud gets dumped on them, as it surely will be.
My sense of loss over Hillary Rodham Clinton has as much to do with my age as with her sex. If she symbolized anything it was that the aspirations of a generation still had meaning. At least they would have, if and when she finally got to show what she was made of.
I thought she accomplished some of that yesterday and that, taking gracious leave, she with her flawed ambition set a higher bar for the next president. That's worth choking up about.