It’s Barack’s party, but Hillary’s going to make him cry ’cause she wants to.
The Democratic faithful were ready to rock and roll as the convention kicked off today, but the tensions between Obama and Clinton supporters threw a pall over the gathering, despite the pleas for unity and statements of support.
The bickering ranged from Bill Clinton’s speaking role to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s delegates and how they’ll vote – to one of her supporters accusing an Obama backer of a racial slur.
And even though a tentative truce was hammered out – a truncated roll call tomorrow night will let Clinton get some votes but wrap things up with an unanimous call for support for Obama – the anger is palpable.
The deal, however, gets around a tricky problem – keeping Clinton from getting too close to Obama in a delegate vote, or from being weakened by having her considerable posse of delegates do a complete 180 for Obama.
She also said she wouldn’t tell her delegates how to vote, other than saying she herself will vote for Obama.
The tensions made even the most placid pols testy.
“This is like a yesterday room,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said. “The nomination is decided. We have a vice president. We will work together to go forward. Every convention has its areas of disagreement. To stay wallowing in all of this is not productive.”
Clinton, if sour, is pouting passively. At the New York delegation breakfast, she insisted said she wouldn’t tell her delegates which way to vote, saying she wanted all her supporters to work hard for Obama – just like she would.
She then ripped GOP Sen. John McCain’s recent attempts to use her primary-race attacks against Obama.
“I’m Hillary Clinton, and I do not approve that message,” she said, to thunderous applause from the crowd in the ballroom at the Sheraton in Denver.
“I ask each and every one of you to work as hard for Barack and Joe Biden as you worked for me.”
It was a script she tried hard to keep to throughout the day.
“I’m doing everything I can possibly do” to get her supporters – with polls showing many of them still disaffected – to move toward Obama, she said.
“I have done more in the past two months than people in my position historically have done, and I will keep doing it,” she added.
Those sore losers? “Outliers,” she insisted.
“There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that this is Barack Obama’s convention, and that is as it should be,” she said.
But the New York senator just couldn’t let go all the way, saying she can’t force her supporters to vote O.
“How they vote is a more personal decision,” she demurred. “They want to have their chance to vote for me . . . some people are having to make up their minds because there are arguments pulling them both ways.”
Meanwhile, on the tarmac in Moline, Iowa, hundreds of miles away from the Democratic National Convention, Obama pushed back on reports that Bill Clinton is unhappy with his assigned speaking topic tomorrow night – a security theme. “I said, Mr. President, you can say whatever you like,” Obama said of his conversation with the former president, with whom he spoke last week.
The two sides were said to be working toward some kind of accommodation so the former president – who is expected to have a low profile at the convention and won’t be here for the whole event – feels comfortable.
Obama also insisted, despite Sen. Clinton advisers saying she had never been formally vetted for vice president, that she “would have been on anybody’s short list, and so I took her very seriously.”
Asked whether that meant she was actually on his short list, he wouldn’t directly answer, but said, “I think you can draw that conclusion.”
And Obama said he believes the Clintons will work as hard as they can for him. But some of Clinton’s supporters remained furious – especially at the prospect of an abbreviated roll call.
“To try to suppress the celebration that we all want to have about her achievements is what would tear this party apart,” said Mary Boergers, a Maryland delegate.
At the same time, reports swirled about ongoing divisions between supporters of the two candidates – including a black Clinton delegate who claimed an Obama political rabbi called her an “Uncle Tom.”
Chicago political consultant Delmarie Cobb said Emil Jones, the Illinois Senate president, called her the slur Saturday night during a conversation about her backing of Clinton, and she called it “fighting words.”
Jones, who’s black, insisted he never said it, claiming he called Cobb and Clinton boosters “doubting Thomases.”
But Cobb said that didn’t wash, claiming she had confronted Jones Saturday when he made the statement and he didn’t suggest she misheard it.
Clinton herself heaped praise on running mate Sen. Joe Biden today, but some of her boosters remain convinced she would have been the best asset for the ticket.
Some eagle-eyed Republicans pointed to a Gallup poll number today that showed Biden didn’t give Obama the same instant vice-presidential bounce that others have seen in recent election cycles.