Op-Ed Columns

And so it ends, Hillary. There will be bands and cheering crowds and snow-showers of confetti ahead, but they will be only marginally for you. You now slip back into that familiar, life-long role of supporter in chief.

But what a helluva campaign you ran. You were magnificent. The country saw you as I did: intelligent, focused, good-natured, tough without meanness, and what stamina! They must have put neutrons in your cereal.

Not only that; you looked great, slimmer.

Josephine and I were with you to the end, believing as we do that you would make a superb general-election candidate and the better-prepared president "from day one."

Your 18 million votes, almost a match with Barack Obama's 18 million-plus, are proof that you were an excellent candidate. Also, candidates of such superiority that they battled almost to a draw speak to the strength of the Democratic Party.

There should be no reason for recriminations or apologies about the race you and your people ran. You were beaten only by a hair, even though Obama's message touched a national yearning and his cyber-campaign was superior.

If you don't already know him, you will meet a hometown boy now living in South Carolina, Phil Noble Jr., a tall, drawling genius who founded Politicsonline.com. He believes that the infinite strands of the Internet web can put five million Obama supporters on the streets and raise an additional half-billion dollars.

Having just collided with the invisible force field of the Obama technology, you understand better than most what a political weapon the party has to use.

After a well-deserved rest, if you can gear down to actually do it, I expect your attention will turn in two complimentary directions: the defining of the candidate and the electing of a filibuster-proof Congress, with which much can be done.

John McCain has begun to fill in the outline of this man previously known only to the class of political professionals and journalists. On McCain's palette is a picture of Obama as a far-out liberal, a weak-kneed rookie.

On the national scene, he is a relative rookie, but man if this isn't a year for the fresh breeze of freshmen to air out a White House that gives off the sour odor of manipulative old hands — Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld and Co.

As to the liberal charge, that is not what I see. To me, there is something profoundly conservative about the Obama campaign. It is a Restoration, both in terms of the founding fathers' intent and of lost American agreements and expectations.

Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson and Washington would have hated the uncivil, uncompromising, ruthless partisanship whose modern practitioners were Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and Karl Rove.

Factions, they called them, and in 1787, too, they were at war. "So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts."

Obama's bridging, restorative one-nation appeal, his repeated assertion that there are no red states or blue states, only red, white and blue American states, has fired the imagination of the young and millions of others.

There was an American agreement that lasted from Franklin Roosevelt right through the Nixon years that government properly used can fulfill the expectations of the people in peace and in war.

Social turmoil driven by the threat of involuntary service in another unpopular, unnecessary war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement and the pent-up explosions of urban blacks in scary riots shattered that consensus.

Reagan put the seal on the bottled agreement when he declared that the government is the enemy. The void left by the abandoned civic concord was filled by ever louder and meaner partisan conflict.

Obama has not been schooled as a special pleader because he did not rise out of a protest movement; he was made in the assembly of politics, which values harmony, compromise. His introduction to the nation was as a unifier.

I've read his last book and I believe he really intends to restore lost agreements. But to do so he also needs to learn the ways of rural and small-town America, what they expect from life and the government.

As House Speaker Sam Rayburn said when told about all the Harvard-educated Kennedy cabinet and staff, "I'd feel a little better if just one of 'em had run for county sheriff."

Let's see if we can't get Obama to come down here to have a give-and-take with some of the better Southern journalists, but more importantly to spend a few hours with Calhoun County Commissioner Eli Henderson, a big Democrat, booster of both Confederate and civil rights commemoratives.

And so, Hillary, as your road turns, I salute you as one of the most fabulous female politicians I know: a model to mothers and daughters in our own time and especially to young women in the rising generation.

As you campaign along with Obama, together you will represent a nobler picture of America to our own citizens and to the world.