“It is time!”

There are times when even the most gifted challenger must call it a day.

Now is such a time.

Whether it is today, tomorrow, or next month, it is over.

And there is a time when every challenger must intuit it for to go on would not only be self-defeating; it would diminish one in the eyes of those who have shaped the outcome.

The Super Delegates and the uncommitted delegates cannot deny the nod to the candidate who has shown that even in the worst of weeks, he possesses the ‘right stuff.’

After a campaign in which the challenger found her stride in Pennsylvania, and argued that it was she who had the ‘momentum,’ in an effort to turn the Super Delegates to her side, that momentum seemed to fizzle out in the precincts of North Carolina and Indiana last night. A finale that was exacerbated when in the wee hours the results in Lake County filtered in. That for whatever reason, was the moment of truth and it signaled that in the best of times, she could only manage the slimmest of leads.

If Nature hadn’t run its course, surely the panjandrums of giving, the architects of largess would have seen the hand-writing on the wall just as surely as night follows day. And if they hadn’t, the Super Delegates would have seen through any self-constructed calculus or attempts to rewrite the past.

There was no way that the tide could be reversed in the remaining days, weeks through the end of the primary in June of a campaign that ran too long with the expectation of somehow changing what was unchangeable. And the Super Delegates perhaps more than anyone else understood that this campaign had largely run its course and everything else was window-dressing that could not transform the thinking of the uncommitted..

It was time to gather one’s resources and consider what was best for the party, a party badly damaged by the vicissitudes of an overly long campaign, a campaign that in the remaining days had pandered to the lowest common denominator for momentary advantage.

Now, was the time to think not only of party unity but the question that plagues all challengers in a contest that cannot be won.

Last night, Obama had taken the first step with his measured words that spoke to a larger truth.. It was now the time to begin the healing process and work towards positioning the party to prepare for what was to come, a campaign that would test both sides and the future of the country.

In the next weeks, when the truth settles in, the winner and challenger must come together in a show of unity that will dazzle the uncommitted and seal a democratic victory.

It seems that there is a natural ebb and flow to politics as there is to Nature and that this year, it falls upon the democrats to restore balance and harmony to a system that seemingly has gone hay-wire over the last eight years.

In the last eight years, the party that has sought to govern, has discovered that it has no talent for governance but, instead, has a thirst for self-righteous bullying that has no place in today’s world. Even the republicans recognize that though they may fight the good battle, they must re-examine their party’s identity and what it is they truly stand for. And no matter how they prance on the stage, that they cannot reverse the failures of the last eight years or an inescapable truth..

In the end, most will agree that it will ultimately fall to a unified democratic party to restore the foundations that gave us purpose and to recommit to what we stand for in a world poised on the brink.

And, in that, there is a kind of restorative coherence that can heal our wounds and start us on the road to hope.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon