I haven’t written a diary here in forever, although I was once a pretty active member. But I feel compelled to write something today, because today I am filled with a feeling of pure happiness.
My support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy goes all the way back to 2008. I identified with her journey as a woman who attended Yale Law School and began a legal career just a few years before I did. I had been in meetings with her during her years as a Senator when I was utterly dazzled by her intellect. Although I had admired Barack Obama since a colleague who’d been Obama’s law school classmate gave me a copy of his first memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” I believed Clinton was better prepared to be president, and was more progressive on many issues. Obama’s own very dazzling intellect and prescient opposition to the Iraq War weren’t enough to sway me away from Clinton.
When Clinton lost to Obama, it hurt. I thought the press, and at times even Obama himself, had been dismissive of her and her achievements. I never considered not voting for Obama — as I said, I’d admired him for years before he became a national figure in 2004, and had long believed he’d be president someday. I just didn’t think it would be a mere four years later. And I wasn’t sure I could work actively for him. I couldn’t imagine feeling about him the way I felt about Clinton. I came around pretty quickly, in significant part because Clinton herself asked me to work for him as hard and as enthusiastically as I’d worked for her. And I did, and I’m so very glad I did.
At many times in the last few months, I’ve been very angry at Bernie Sanders and/or his supporters. There was the barely concealed contempt for Clinton and her supporters, the seeming diminishment of the importance of the black vote in the Democratic base, the apparent refusal to accept that a Sanders loss was the result of anything except voter suppression, election fraud, low information voters or corruption. When it became clear that Sanders might pursue a strategy of holding out until the convention to persuade superdelegates committed to Clinton to overrule the majority of pledged delegates and the expressed will of the majority of primary voters, I really lost it. All the respect I’d had for Sanders over the years for his articulation of important progressive principles evaporated. Part of the reason I’ve been here so little during the last few months was because I didn’t want to engage in debates that seemed fated to become angry.
Last night, even as I basked in Clinton’s decisive victories in NJ, SD, NM and sweetest of all, CA, I was irritated by Sanders’ refusal not only to concede, but by his refusal to acknowledge the historic nature of Clinton’s achievement in becoming the first woman to be a major party’s presumptive nominee. Politico's article, posted late last night, about the “last bitter days” of Sanders’ campaign seemed to confirm everything I had suspected about Sanders himself, and suggested that Sanders was unlikely to concede gracefully, as Clinton had done in 2008. I was ready to be angry and suspicious of Sanders’ motives and believe the worst.
But today, I feel so very zen. Today, I am filled with a sense of possibility and optimism about the future. I remember my mother’s stories about how no one, not her parents or her teachers, told her to apply to the then-free City College, even though she was a straight A student, because she was a poor Puerto Rican girl from Spanish Harlem. I remember hearing a college classmate tell me I had “taken” his place at Yale Law School, even though his grades and LSAT scores were not as good as mine, because I was a woman and a Latina to boot.I remember the shock of finding that many of my supposedly progressive male friends understood how HE felt, but not how I felt. I remember a senior partner (who later became a mentor) tell me when I was a junior associate that I was too pretty to be taken seriously as a lawyer. I remember being mistaken for the court reporter more times than I can count. I remember being told I could not be a serious lawyer if I took more than 6 weeks maternity leave or that I was a bad mother if I went back to work. And despite my incredible education, my legal talents and my capacity for hard work, I remember drawing lines and limits for myself. I could not be a major rainmaker. I could not become a federal judge. I could not become a leader at the firm. Because I was a working mother and it would be too much.
Today, I am full of gratitude that I can savor the moment when a woman claimed victory in a contest for the Democratic nomination with my 82 year old mother and my two 20-something daughters (all of whom supported Clinton too). One daughter is at Yale Law School herself, and the other will attend law school in a few years. They will have great careers. No one has ever told them they are taking someone else’s place. No is telling them they are too pretty to be taken seriously. No one will tell them they can’t be rainmakers or judges or any kind of leader they want to be (and they do). We will watch together as a woman is officially nominated as the Democratic candidate for President of the United States, and when she is sworn in as the 45th President of the United States.
That gratitude, that optimism, that JOY, so suffuses me today that I am no longer angry or irritated at Senator Sanders. I can wait for him to find the strength to do what Hillary did 8 years ago (well, for a while). I can feel his pain and the pain of his supporters. I remember how hard it was to readjust to a new reality. And I really believe that Senator Sanders will do the right thing, and soon. Because he knows, as we all do, that Donald Trump and the GOP pose the greatest threat to progressive principles in a generation.
I hope most of you share my sense of joy, but for those of you who don’t: let yourself grieve. And then join us. Hillary may not have been your preferred candidate, but she is more than just the lesser of two evils. Give her a chance. Be open. Be optimistic. Feel joy.
