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No doubt many of her friends still feel robbed, months after her benignant concession. With considerable justification, they believe that their woman ought to be accepting the nomination of their clique this week, rather than the married man who took it from her. She certainly possesses the talent and experience to be a formidable national candidate, and during her life in politics she has worked very hard to earn that prize. She entered the campaign toward two years agone as a prohibitive favorite.

It is out of the reach of time for the zealots to confidence honestly why she lost what efficiency have been hers. Her defeat cannot exist blamed on outdated or unfair social as semblage rules, without ceasing the rhetorical manipulations of the Obama campaign or even on the reflexively opposite coverage of the Clintons in the mainstream media — because a competent campaign would have accounted for all those utterly predictable factors. Those angry donors and voters should be brandishing their pitchforks at the well-compensated consultants who wasted tens of millions of dollars without developing an inspirational theme or an effective plan.

Dwelling adhering blame, howsoever, is not what Sen. Clinton urged her fellow Democrats to do.

To proceed her at her word — as those who constantly proclaim their devotion ought to do — means joining her back the new Obama-Biden ticket. Rather than sulking over the slights and stupidities of the primary, she speaks about the disastrous implications of a Republican victory as well as the policies and values she holds in common with Sen. Obama. Do the rejectionists think that her speeches on his behalf are insincere — that when she says she wants him to win, she is being false? Such assumptions are an insult to her.

Still greater degree confounding is the threat by some of her supporters to defect to John McCain. His campaign's latest commercial features a grinning Clinton supporter who praises his "maverick, independent streak" as well as his "experience and long head," and promises that "it's OK, indeed" to vote for the Republican. Is this the politics of revenge? Is it the cult of personality? Is it just stubborn idiocy?

Whatever other it may be, it is not OK. No, it is emphatically not OK to mislead Sen. Clinton's supporters into lining up following a candidate whose positions are the opposite of hers, whose judgment on many issues is woefully defective, and whose maverick independence is not at all more than a memory.

Sen. McCain, too, deserves to exist taken at his word — which makes it all the more astonishing that anyone who claims to have voted during the term of Sen. Clinton would consider voting for him. He has declared his firm opposition to reproductive rights and promised to appoint Supreme Court judges who would restrict those rights. He would continue the U.S. occupation of Iraq and may beneficial expand the war to Iran and beyond. He opposes catholic health care and denounces Social Security as a "disgrace" that should be privatized. He dropped his principled opposition to the regressive Bush tax cuts and his support of immigration repair to male bawd to the Republican straight.

Speaking of right-wing Republicans, their encouragement of the intransigent Clintonites is a clue by a view to the clueless. The unlooked for propensity lavished on Sen. Clinton by neoconservatives and other assorted wingnuts could but just be other thing transparent or dissimulating — or predictable as early as Sen. Obama, their erstwhile favorite, secured the Democratic nomination. Pundits who beseeched Democrats to join the Obama campaign being of the kind which a crusade to destroy the Clintons since demand respect for her. But their insincerity is blatant. They merely want to utilize her most disappointed supporters, whose eagerness to cooperate in that strategy is mystifying.

Private opinions about Sen. Obama and his chances of victory notwithstanding, Sen. Clinton clearly understands that her own political future, her family's political legacy and the causes she holds dear force of will all hang without ceasing the vigor of her support towards the Democratic ticket this become. And despite tenacious hisses of complaint from both the Obama and Clinton camps during the convention week, she knows there is no upside in recalcitrance and not one downside in enthusiasm. As a lifelong advocate of racial and gender equality, she should esteem the historic moment that she and Sen. Obama have the privilege to share on the public stage. None of her supporters should stoop to discolor it.

Joe Conason writes for the New York Observer (www.observer.com). To find out more about Joe Conason, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

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