The moment called for graciousness.

Hillary Clinton didn’t answer the call.

The moment called for a modicum of class.

None was to be found, except for a feint at the beginning, when Senator Clinton said she was “congratulating Senator Obama and his supporters on the race that they have run.”

It was if Obama had lost, and Clinton was just being magnanimous.

In long passages of the speech, it seemed like she was living in a parallel universe where the news had not yet arrived that the race was over and she actually was not going to be the Democratic nominee.

For there she was, inexplicably, still arguing that she was “the strongest candidate,” the one “who will be ready to take back the White House and take charge as commander-in-chief and lead our country to better tomorrows.”

Earth to Hillary: You lost, and these comments are not helpful to Barack Obama’s cause, echoing as they do your charge earlier in the campaign that McCain is ready to be commander-in-chief and Obama is not.

Nor was it helpful for her to stress that she won “the swing states necessary to get to 270 electoral votes.”

Or the moldy refrain about counting “every single vote,” even after the Rules Committee decided on the Florida and Michigan cases that she gamed to the end.

In a none-too-subtle muscle move for the Vice Presidency, she said: “I want the nearly 18 million Americans who voted for me to be respected, to be heard, and no longer to be invisible.”

Never having given a proper concession speech all primary season long, she didn’t start now. “I will be making no decisions tonight,” she said.

And so she is leaving the campaign as she conducted it all along: arrogantly, shamelessly, disgracefully.