Rehabilitation for Hillary Clinton

This post by "Sean" on FiveThirtyEight.com pretty much articulated my feelings toward Hillary Clinton to a tee.

He wrote this before she made her speech, which ever-so-slightly exceeded my expectations of what she would actually do, but surely fell short of what Sean would deem necessary for her rehabilitation. I tend to agree with him.

The argument is that Clinton poisoned Obama's image in the minds of her supporters by acting like his campaign was dirty, sexist and disrespectful. So even though she's ostensibly thrown her support behind Obama and asked her faithful to do the same, she's done so without healing the perceived wounds. In other words, her supporters still believe that she (and by extension they) were somehow wronged by the process. In that case, they might feel that Hillary has to do this because she's being bullied by Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi et. al., but that they have still been wronged.

Therefore Sean's argument was for Clinton to heal those wounds by acknowledging that the outrage and emotion she stirred up in her followers were based on lies. And that she wasn't robbed, nor were FLA and MICH and that Obama's not by any means an elitist or a Muslim or a sexist. And that her campaign was the one fighting dirty, while his largely took the high road.

If she were to come clean about that, Sean argues, then maybe, possibly, he could see her in a different light.

But she didn't. And so now it's left to Obama himself to reach out to her supporters, and that's going to be far more difficult because she didn't come completely clean.

The more I think about it - it seems that this really isn't over, and she might, over the next six months, subtly undermine him with an eye on 2012. I hope I'm wrong - and that this wasn't a calculated half measure - but instead the best that she could do given who she is.