No self-reflection or recriminations for her. It’s just keeps us from moving forward, she says. She declares her determination to help Barack Obama with more enthusiasm this time, imploring her supporters to help him.

She said not say a single  harsh word about John McCain. She didn’t wallow.

She did give one of the best speeches of her career. She was vulnerable. She ended on a high note.

What’s interesting is that this may really be the true Hillary, the “I didn’t stay home and bake cookies” Hillary, the one who has been in hiding ever since.

She recites her litany of women’s rights issues. “There are no acceptable limits. There are no accetable predjudices.” This is clearly the hardest for her. If she was not before, she came to believe she was the feminist role model and victim in this race. To those her are disappointed, she says it would break her heart. . . to discourage them for pursuing their goals. (Not be disappoionted, mind you, if they didn’t vote for Barack Obama.) The sisterhood of Hillary is the base for 2012.

What young people? The average age of a Hillary voter was 93.

Of course, she’s only 20 months old.

…for her value as a vice-presidential candidate. Her tribute to Obama is without qualification, and exactly what he would like to hear. And Lord knows she would be unafraid to play the attack dog in debates. “Together, Senator Obama and I achieved milestones,” she says. She wants more.

When she applauded her husband and mentioned his two presidential victories, was that love? Resentment? Was it a painful reminder that she could not equal his achievement? Was it fury that he had made her own campaign so hard?

…ever since New Hampshire. Something happened to her cadence, her tone, her ability to convey feeling. Her delivery is very powerful and assured.

…over the past 40 years with a Democrat as president,” she says. Yes. Because one-party rule is always so helpful to a nation.

She  recites her endorsement without a smile. She endorses and throws her support , she says, but her expression is without joy, without enthusiasim and without warmth. Some things are too much to ask. There is a hostage-tape like quality about this.

I write this without criticism. She believes she is the stronger candidate and her dream for now is gone. You don’t have to want her to win to recognize that this is one of the lowest moments of her life.

Has this ordeal strengthened her marriage or has it turned the whole shooting match to ashes in her throat?

She looks like she wants to curl up in a ball.

John,  the proof of your words is painted on her face. She looked on the verge of tears as she began. “This is sure not the party I planned but I like the company.”

Having spent a year trying very hard not to run as a woman, her concession speech is entirely about the historic nature of her running as a woman. In the end, in American politics right now, demography is destiny. We are all affirmative-action babies now.

Imagine that you have spent 18 months, 7 days a week, 17 hours a day, running for a party nomination for president, that you got 18 million primary votes, and that you still lost. A longer race than anyone has ever run; that began with so much promise and so much hope and ended, oddly, with a victory in South Dakota rather than a series of losses. She will recover from this; but people who think she is going to run for president again if Obama loses this year might want to think twice. There’s a reason Al Gore didn’t run again in 2004. The emotional consequences of this kind of disappointment, on this kind of epic scale, are unknown to the rest of us.

The media is none too pleased about being lied to by the Obama campaign about his secret meeting with Hillary Clinton this week. The Washington bureau chiefs sent a letter of protest. Next, they might start demanding regular pressers, access to fundraising events (the McCain camp is doing that) and even release of all his medical records. Well, maybe not being lied to is a place to start.

There’s a reason it was so difficult for Hillary and Bill Clinton to come to grips with her loss to Barack Obama; they haven’t been part of a losing election since 1980, when he lost his initial reelection bid for governor of Arkansas. Even in 2000, when Al Gore finally conceded the presidential election to George W. Bush, the Clintons could a) comfort themselves with the thought that Gore had actually won and b) saw Hillary win her Senate seat that November by a 12-point margin. She won in a walk in 2006. So she had triumphed in the only two elections she contested before this year, and since 1980 he had won six straight elections (Arkansas governor in 1982, 1984, 1986, and 1988, and president in 1992 and 1996). They couldn’t believe in the possibility of her defeat because there had been no defeat in their lives for almost 28 years.

Having decided not to concede on Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton prepares to do so at a mobbed event at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. One might wonder why she chose to suck up another day, if not weekend, of news coverage and why she would not consider the impact on Barack Obama’s campaign of another round of “Hillary fans vow to vote for John McCain” stories. But this is Hillary and 2012 is only 4 years away. If she does the minimum expected to support the nominee and he loses the New Hillary, just like the New Nixon, will be back.

But she really won’t be going away. The GOP has an entire website now devoted to her criticisms about Obama.