WASHINGTON — During the campaign, it was her opponent who owned the lofty rhetoric. But on the day she finally conceded defeat, it was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s words that soared.
“As we gather here today,” she told her supporters and staff members at the National Building Museum on Saturday, “the 50th woman to leave this Earth is orbiting overhead. If we can blast 50 women into space, we will someday launch a woman into the White House.”
Two-hundred-forty miles below the international space station, the midday sunlight pouring into the 100-foot-high atrium illuminated the thousands who had come to bid the Clinton presidential candidacy farewell: most of them women, many of them with young children, some of them in tears.
Saturday brought the house of Clinton full circle. Fifteen years ago, one of Bill Clinton’s first inaugural balls was held in this same building, modeled on Roman palaces. The Corinthian columns stood as before, but this time a white-haired Bill Clinton merely gave a silent salute to the crowd.
When Hillary Clinton got to the exhortation to “do all we can to help elect Barack Obama the next president of the United States,” some boos hollered from the balconies mixed with the applause. The isolated booing returned each of the half-dozen times Clinton returned to a variation of the phrase.
“I would die and slit my wrist before I’d vote for Obama,” said a Silver Spring, Md., woman in the Clinton volunteers section who gave her name only as Edith.
She wore a sign pinned to the back of her Hillary T-shirt proposing: “Remember in November: vote present.”
There were hints that Clinton herself was appearing with reluctance. She arrived 45 minutes late for the speech. She wore black. She took the stage to the Goo Goo Dolls tune “Better Days.” She uttered 650 words before she uttered “Barack Obama.”
“Well, this isn’t exactly the party I’d planned,” she said, “but I sure like the company.”
No doubt. The floor and balconies were jammed with thousands of supporters, who had lined up in the oppressive heat. Among them was Norma Mobley, 81, of Dallas, a McCain supporter who was in town for a funeral but came to see Clinton because “it’s a part of history.”
Behind the podium, some of the young women who volunteered for the campaign wept and hugged as Clinton spoke to “the young people who put so much into this campaign: It would break my heart if, in falling short of my goal, I in any way discouraged any of you from pursuing yours.”
Soon the rally was over, and the crowd filed outside, where the Clinton ’08 T-shirts had been marked down to $5 each.
Before leaving, Clinton aide Maria Cardona, holding her 3-year-old son’s hand and her 15-month-old daughter in a sling, reflected on the candidate’s parting words about the children.
“That’s why I brought them,” she said. “They both can be president.”
