Hillary Clinton Supports Barack Hussein Obama

[BarackH]

After five months of a hard-fought battle with Barack Hussein Obama for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton issued a statement to supporters early this morning saying, “On Saturday, I will extend my congratulations to Senator Obama and my support for his candidacy.”



While it doesn’t say implicitly that she’s getting out of the race and officially conceding, it certainly sounds that way. On the other hand, a lot of pundits and political observers have been waiting for Clinton to concede for some time and she hasn’t done so yet.

Obama went over the 2,118 mark for delegates needed to capture the nomination on Tuesday night but Clinton declined to make any snap pronouncements that night.

According to her campaign, she wants to hold off an event until Saturday to give her supporters a chance to make travel plans for an event in Washington, D.C., in their honor and, ostensibly, to bring an end to the campaign.

But it was becoming clear that pressure on her had been building for weeks, if not months, to leave the race as pundits and political observers suggested it was all but mathematically impossible for her to make up the ground against Obama in pledged delegates unless super-delegates, who can back whom they want, swung en masse to her side.

They never did although she continued to make her case that she was more electable than Obama in November against presumptive Republican nominee John McCain in impressive fashion – reeling off wins in Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky and Puerto Rico.

But she failed to capture North Carolina and her margin of victory in Indiana – neighboring Illinois, where Obama is the junor U.S. senator – wasn’t as large as predicted.

Another blow – perhaps the fatal one to her campaign – came Saturday, when Obama flexed his newfound authority as the front-runner and likely nominee among Democratic Party leaders. The national party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee met to decide whether to seat Michigan and Florida’s delegations, lost when they scheduled earlier-than-allowed primaries this year.

Clinton – who won both handily – demanded the full delegations be seated and to her benefit, just as they would have been if the voting had counted, even though she said at the time of those states’ primaries they did not count and agreed to a pledge not to campaign in either state.

Instead, the committee restored only half of the delegations’ voting authority at this convention and agreed to an apportionment of delegates from Michigan – where Barack Hussein Obama’s name was not even on the ballot after he took it off in protest of the disallowed primary – that effectively ended her chances of catching up to the presumptive nominee.

Supporters have taken it hard. One called the Free Press this morning after an article in which a Democratic consultant said he didn’t know of a single Democrat who wouldn’t swing back to the nominee this fall. “He denied my constitutional right to vote,” the caller said.

Other Michigan callers offered that they, too, would not back Obama, and would perhaps vote for presumptive Republican nominee John McCain – a window into the healing in the party Obama will have to try to do if he is to win the election and become America’s first black president.

That work could begin Saturday in Washington, according to Clinton, who said in her note this morning, “I have said throughout the campaign that I would strongly support Senator Obama if he were the Democratic Party's nominee, and I intend to deliver on that promise.”

“I will be speaking on Saturday about how together we can rally the party behind Senator Obama. The stakes are too high and the task before us too important to do otherwise,” she said.

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