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for president, I always gave the same answer, that I was proud to be running as a woman, but I was running because Ithought I’d be the best president,” she said, building to an echo of the famous line—“Ain’t I a woman”—that Sojourner Truth uttered at a Women’s Convention in 1851. “But I am a woman, and like millions of women, I know there are still barriers and biases out there, often unconscious, and I want to build an America that respects and embraces the potential of every last one of us.”
    Hillary, having integrated the struggles of women and African Americans by subtly paying homage to Truth, retreated briefly from the building momentum, allowing the crowd to recover—for just a moment—before etching an indelible line in the nation’s political memory.
    “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about eighteen million cracks in it,” she said, as her supporters, some of them in tears, burst into applause. “And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.”
    With everyone in the building now rapt, Hillary bound her cause to Obama’s through a more explicit marriage of the women’s rights movement and the black civil rights movement. “Think of the suffragists who gathered at Seneca Falls in 1848 and those who kept fighting until women could cast their votes,” she said. “Think of the abolitionists who struggled and died to see the end of slavery. Think of the civil rights heroes and foot soldiers who marched, protested, and risked their lives to bring about the end to segregation and Jim Crow.”
    It was a powerful pivot, from the emotional pull of the women’s movement and the hope of electing the first woman president to the parallel arc of the civil rights movement and the possibility that her own followers could still make history by electing Obama. Women and African Americans, and no small number of activists who were both, shared the same struggle for equality and opportunity. Moreover, it was a personal struggle.
    “Because of them, I grew up taking for granted that women could vote, and because of them, my daughter grew up taking forgranted that children of all colors could go to school together,” Hillary said. “Because of them, Barack Obama and I could wage a hard-fought campaign for the Democratic nomination. Because of them and because of you, children today will grow up taking for granted that an African American or a woman can, yes, become the president of the United States.”
    No doubt the same logic could be applied to rally African Americans, Hispanics, gays, and other minorities to her cause if she ran for president again.
    The argument sounded so genuine because she, too, had to give up her dream, or at least defer it. It had once seemed so inevitable, her course to the White House and certainly to the Democratic nomination, and now she was being asked to support the guy nearly fifteen years her junior who had skipped the line to get in front of her. To ask her millions of followers to do the same thing, she needed to give a compelling explanation for her own conversion.
    The two factions in Hillary’s campaign had battled over the balance of eulogizing her own candidacy and endorsing Obama’s for so long that talking points for the media were drafted in an anteroom
after
the speech was delivered. The speech was really hard to write, she thought, and just as hard to deliver. But it was credible because she didn’t ask her supporters to do anything she wasn’t willing to do. Like her candidacy, it was both aspirational and inspirational, and her decision to link herself so directly with the cause of women’s rights was an early sign that Hillary was ready to take charge of a new political narrative that cast her more as a pioneer and an Obama loyalist than either her husband or his old