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Hillary Clinton bows out and endorses Barack Obama

By liza
Created 7 Jun 2008 - 2:31pm

I came in just in time to watch Hillary Clinton give her endorsement to Barack Obama. It was an interesting speech. She never talked about losing, she talked about the disappointment of not getting the nomination. She also didn't talk about Obama's legitimate win, she only mentioned his victory.

I was on Twitter [1]writing about the speech and I have to say I am relieved she finally said the words a lot of us wanted to hear 2 months ago : that is time to come together and support Obama.

I thought it was gracious and I also noticed that she kept on repeating at the end "we need to help elect barack obama our president" [2], almost as if she repeated it seven times herself she would truly and honestly embrace it.

I was also taken aback by her late realization that she became a woman who ran for president as opposed to being a candidate who happened to be a woman. I've always said that Hillary Clinton never struck me as a feminist, but as one of the millions of middle class white women who benefitted from the equal opportunity policies that came after the Civil Rights and Women's Rights movements.

Yet this campaign seems to have made her a born-again feminist [3] :

"I am a woman, and like millions of women, I know there are still barriers and biases out there, often unconscious, and I want to build an America that respects every one of us," she said. "We must make sure that women and men alike understand the struggles of their grandmothers and mothers."

It was really refreshing to hear her say that this country needed to work for women's equality. It's amazing, because as the Senator of New York I had never, ever heard her utter those words.

So am going to say "Thanks Hillary" and leave it at that, for now because the hard part just begun --after a brutal campaign that she waged by attacking Obama as the least prepared of the two, there's just no amount of campaigning she can do that'll take those words back.



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