Dear Senator Clinton,
It is very easy to be a dispenser of advice. It is very easy to suggest selflessness on someone else’s part. It is extremely easy to advocate a courageous stand when one’s own backside or reputation or historical achievement or marriage does not hang in the balance. In the event there is doubt about any of these claims, keep reading.
Why did the nation have to be blessed with the choice you and Senator Obama represent? Bad luck, one supposes. One might say that each of you was in a position to predict what was gong to happen. Maybe. One might also say that if the thought even occurred to either of you that the nation would be better off with someone other than you as president at this time, then whichever thought it, does not have the necessary ego strength to withstand the pressures of the job, much less do it properly.
But is it not clear what you should do in the circumstance in which you find yourself? Can you not honestly say that Barack Obama would be an excellent president? Maybe he would not bring all that you do to the table, good and bad, quite frankly, but isn’t he the stuff of which fine leaders are made?
I suggest that you do your fellow citizens the greatest of services and agree to step aside. You will thereby afford this nation the opportunity to step out from underneath the cloud which has bedevilled us for centuries. I ask you to look around and see if there is not evidence, at this moment, that the divisions of race are being healed, literally as these words are being written, by the hope that Barack Obama may ascend to the most powerful position on the face of the earth? See it in the eyes of African-American people throughout this country. See it on the face of Africans conceiving of the idea. See it in the energy of youth who have been living, each to the other, as if race doesn’t matter but who needed the proof in the most desperate of ways.
Put us all to bed with smiles on our faces. You will have achieved in a stroke an unimaginable legacy..