DENVER - For one evening, their political world was perfect. Or so it seemed.
Standing before thousands of delegates, almost half of them her backers, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton declared it time "to unite as a single party with a single purpose" and urged her followers to help elect once-bitter rival Barack Obama. "We are on the same team," she said, after allowing the applause to build to a crescendo and linger, longer than usual much like the Democratic primary race itself.
"Barack Obama is my candidate," she said. "And he must be our president."
But did she mean it? And would it matter?
True, her challenges Tuesday night were impossibly high, perhaps mutually exclusive.
She had to both promote her political future and unify her party. Clinton had to somehow convince people that she honestly thought Obama was ready for the presidency. But something stood in her way: Her words.
_Dec. 3, 2007: "So you decide which makes more sense: Entrust our country to someone who is ready on Day One ... or to put America in the hands of someone with little national or international experience, who started running for president the day he arrived in the U.S. Senate."
_March 2008. "I know Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."
_Feb. 23, 2008: "Now, I could stand up here and say, 'Let's just get everybody together. Let's get unified.' The skies will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect."
There in no such thing as a perfect world, though the Clinton and Obama image teams tried their best to create one. Hundreds of "Hillary" signs danced before the TV cameras, bearing her breezy blue signature. Her misty-eyed husband, former President Clinton, watched from above.
*snip*
But she did extract her price.
The bill came due Tuesday. The crowd. The applause. The promise of a vote Wednesday, and a speech laced 17 times by some variation of the pronoun "I."
