Mrs. Clinton said as much to reporters at a press conference the next morning, during which she announced her plans to formally release her delegates at a meeting on Wednesday.
“I will tell them that I intend to vote for Senator Obama,” she said.
But Mrs. Clinton also seemed to provide her supporters with a rationale of why they should vote for her.
“How they vote is a more personal decision, because a lot of them feel like they represent people who sent them there to vote for me,” she said. “A lot of them feel that, you know, they want to have their chance to vote for me and then we’ll all vote together. That is what traditionally happens. We could go back and have a long history lesson about how this has worked before. I don’t think you would find a more cooperative relationship between two campaigns, at least as far as I can remember, in any kind of contested primary season once we get to the convention. So of course some people are having to make up their minds because there are arguments pulling both ways.”
Also during the press conference, Mrs. Clinton was asked what else she could do to convince her holdout supporters to vote for Mr. Obama in November.
“I don’t know,” she answered.
In the days leading up to the convention, Mrs. Clinton and her surrogates made a show of trying to introduce some discipline into the process. They created a convention whip to prevent unruly Clinton delegates from acting up during Mr. Obama’s speech. And they publicly (if not always emphatically) disowned the fringe elements of the party who say they will vote for Mr. McCain instead of Mr. Obama.
By then, though, the McCain campaign already had a plan in place to capitalize on the universal perception of an irreparable split, unveiling commercials—to massive effect, from a free-media perspective—echoing Mrs. Clinton’s criticisms of Mr. Obama from the primary.
On the morning of Aug. 26, shortly after Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign sent an e-mail to reporters advising them about the details of her arrival, two of her most ardent supporters, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack and his wife, Christie, sat together at a coffee shop in downtown Denver. Mr. Vilsack argued that ultimately, the hard-fought Democratic primary contest would prove to have expanded the party’s base enough to compensate for any small fraction of Clinton supporters who bolted. Referring to those rogue supporters—the most spectacularly disaffected of whom have formed into groups like PUMA, or Party Unity My Ass, and Just Say No Deal—Ms. Vilsack said, “It’s about all of them. A lot of her supporters feel bad for her but for themselves, too. They need to get over it. But it takes time.”
A couple of blocks away, later that morning, Bill Clinton gave the opening remarks to an international audience of political and financial leaders at a National Democratic Institute panel. Speaking broadly, he said that a Democratic convention was about introducing a candidate to the country in a more positive light and “uniting the party and defining the battle plan.”
Then he made that mission a little harder, and not for the first time, by posing an ostensibly hypothetical scenario for his audience, and a delighted press corps, to mull:
In future Democratic elections, he wondered, should voters support the person they agree with but are not confident will deliver, or for the person they disagree with but will deliver on promises?
“This has nothing to do with what is going on right now,” he added, ineffectively.
“The politics between the Obama and Clinton campaigns have been clumsy and at times petty, but the point is, now it’s over,” said DNC committeeman Robert Zimmerman, a prominent Clinton donor and New York delegate, hours before Mrs. Clinton’s speech. “It’s now about Barack Obama and John McCain.”
If only.
jhorowitz@observer.com
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