Belated note on Hillary Clinton's Presidential bid

Between various distractions I didn’t get around to blogging Sen. Clinton’s concession speech (link goes to Rebecca Traister’s write up; for the full text, go here). I caught part of it live and thought it was lovely and went a long way to reuniting the party and I certainly thank her for that. Ezra Klein points to a nice American Prospect article on lasting consequences of Sen. Clinton’s run. The ones I found most notably of the positive observations:

• There’s now precedent for a female frontrunner who was strong on a range of feminist issues.
• Sexism was made obvious by the campaign and did inspire some backlash and greater awareness.
• The Senator figured out an ambitious but achievable health plan.

As is obvious from the above list, I do agree with Paul Krugman that there was some raw sexism deployed against her, although in my opinion fairly little of note from the Obama campaign itself (as compared to some of his supporters). The sexism was certainly a contributing if not the decisive factor in her loss (which is all that most of her supporters are saying). That said, I do agree with Kevin Drum’s commentary that not all the alleged race-baiting from the Clinton camp was a media fabrication. On the upside, Mark Penn makes an excellent scapegoat for almost everything.

Anyways, also in the interest of unity, I tend to accept Kathy G’s argument that Obama should not pick Sen. Webb as VP. As she document, while he presently favors having women in the military, he made life rather hard for some early female entrants. Spencer Ackerman doesn’t dispute her main charges but does add some nuance on Webb’s better relevant positions. Nonetheless, after Sen. Clinton’s loss there are bridges to be rebuilt and legitimate desires to be addressed. Avoiding a Veep who is a great Democrat but has a problematic history on gender relations would probably be a good start.

As for Sen. Clinton, I hope Obama works with her on health care because she does have good experience and is a real wonk on both the policy and politics.