Opinion: “...and a proud supporter of Barack Obama.”
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Hillary Clinton: ‘The time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose. We are on the same team and none of us can afford to sit on the sidelines.’
There’s your ‘Pee Wee Reese moment’ -- as described by Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr., who said Monday that Clinton should stand by Barack Obama the way Brooklyn Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese stood beside rookie Jackie Robinson, breaking the baseball color line in 1947, showing the rest of the team that it could embrace an African-American teammate.
I’m not sure the analogy was quite apt; Reese and Robinson weren’t competing for the same job. I think many Obama supporters were secretly wishing for something more like a Jane Pauley moment -- a gracious stepping aside and a modest denial that she had any personal right to the job.
You remember the Jane Pauley moment. Pauley was an icon for professional women in the late 1970s and 1980s as co-host of the NBC morning program ‘Today.’ Her first co-anchor was Tom Brokaw, but some tension arose when Brokaw was replaced by Bryant Gumbel, a groundbreaking television journalist in his own right. Rumors spread that the set wasn’t big enough for both Pauley and Gumbel, and an internal memo from Gumbel seemed to confirm it.
Pauley left the show in 1989. Of course, there were other story lines as well -- that it was all about age and not gender, and was an effort put put Deborah Norville in Pauley’s spot. The point is that later, when asked about her decision to move on, Pauley made a point of saying that, yes, she was only the second woman to anchor ‘Today,’ but that Gumbel was the first African-American in the post. She refused to speak ill of he former co-host.
Who gets to break the ceiling first, the black man or the white woman? It’s pretty touchy, emotion-laden stuff.
‘Were you in this campaign just for me?’ Clinton asked her supporters. It’s the key question, but in this speech, anyway, she didn’t sound like she honestly would take ‘yes’ for an answer.
2003 file photo of Jane Pauley courtesy of Mark Mainz/Getty Images