Tag: Hillary Clinton

Obama’s best speech yet?

As we all know, he always gives a great speech. But it strikes me that, tonight, he’s being unusually effective in putting some flesh on the bones of his “change” message. No, he’s not being much more specific than usual. But he’s at least making a thematic case that old-fashioned partisanship is holding back progress on issues from health care to the high cost of a college education.

Yet another big surprise

On CNN, Carl Bernstein just supplied the story line for at least the next few days: “Bill Clinton is a huge loser in this.” Wow. Barack Obama, 54 percent; Hillary Clinton, 27 percent. The Clinton camp was reportedly prepared to declare moral victory if they could find a way to lose by less than 10 percent percentage points [Thanks, Mike_B1]. Instead, Obama beat her by two to one.

Could you imagine what people would be saying if the polls in South Carolina had been this wrong in Clinton’s favor? And will someone (i.e., Obama) finally get some momentum out of a primary victory during this weird election year?

An ugly Democratic split

My former Boston Phoenix colleague Al Giordano, on leave from the Narco News Bulletin, has been blogging the presidential campaign this winter. He’s got a particularly detailed and perceptive post on the Nevada Democratic caucuses, in which he offers some thoughts — backed up by first-hand reporting — on the increasingly ugly split between pro-Obama African-Americans and pro-Clinton Latinos. Giordano writes:

Now, I’m a connoisseur of ugliness in all its forms, I find it mostly entertaining, but the part of yesterday’s caucus that was so ugly as to be distressing was to see the Hispanic and black communities so polarized: The Clinton caucusers were predominantly Hispanic-American and the Obama caucusers were predominantly African-American — most on both sides were women — and they shouted and taunted each other with boos, cat-calls, hisses, thumbs down, and at one point one man on the Obama side began chanting, “I did not have sex with that woman!”

He concludes: “Frankly, unless events conspire during this 2008 Democratic primary process to reverse those truly ugly developments, any Democrat that thinks that November is already won is a fool that is not to be taken seriously from here on out.” (Thanks to Media Nation reader C.M.)

Last word on the Bradley effect?

If you haven’t read John Judis’ analysis at The New Republic yet, you should. Judis has looked at the numbers from New Hampshire and found that 57 percent of those voting in the Democratic primary were women — substantially more than the 53 percent that had been predicted. Change that assumption, and you’d have had poll numbers within the margin of error. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Where are those college students?

I just got an e-mail from a long-time correspondent who reminded me of something that the cable pundits should have known Tuesday night. Remember when they were saying that Obama still had a chance because the college towns hadn’t reported? Well, guys, the semester hasn’t started yet.

I overlooked that because classes started at Northeastern last week. But we’re on an unusual schedule. Very few other schools start until next week, or in some cases even later. Shouldn’t the folks who make the big bucks have figured that out?

More on the (Tom) Bradley effect

Over at Hub Blog, Jay Fitzgerald has a good post linking to two commentaries by pollsters. In the New York Times, Andrew Kohut argues that a subtle version of the Bradley effect may have made Barack Obama’s support in New Hampshire look stronger than it was — lower-income white voters who might tend to reject a black candidate are also less likely to answer polling questions in the first place.

But John Zogby, in the Huffington Post, says (at least I think this is what he’s saying) that the pollsters didn’t get it wrong so much as they ran out of time. Uh, OK.

More on the Bradley effect

Only this time I’m talking about Bill, not Tom. Robert David Sullivan, one of my editors at CommonWealth Magazine, has analyzed the results of the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama contest in New Hampshire and finds an eerie resemblance to the 2000 Democratic primary between Al Gore and Bill Bradley.

Apparently the archetype is more important than the person. I can’t see much resemblance between Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, but each appealed to New Hampshire’s more traditional Democrats. And the smug, self-regarding Bradley couldn’t be more different from the electrifying Obama (OK, Obama is a bit self-regarding, too), but both had their base among the affluent, the well-educated and the young.

Robert does things with maps and stats that I can barely comprehend, but he makes a plausible case that the way to win a Democratic primary in New Hampshire is to go after the party regulars. Among other things, unlike young people and independents, they can always be counted on to vote.

Random thoughts on N.H.

So what do you care what I think? Like everyone else, I believed the polls and figured Barack Obama was going to win New Hampshire by 10 points — and then run away with the Democratic nomination. In retrospect, Hillary Clinton’s victory makes sense. (It always does in retrospect, doesn’t it?) Why? A few thoughts.

1. The gender card. No, I’m not going to say what you think I’m going to say. The gender card was not played so much by Clinton as by her enemies, especially among the media commentariat. I was struck by something Robin Young said on WBUR (90.9 FM) this morning. During the last few days of the campaign, she said, it seemed as though the media were really piling on, gleefully predicting Clinton’s demise and all but calling her a “bitch.” (Young didn’t actually use the word.)

The result may have been that women in New Hampshire were offended enough to cast their votes for Clinton, whereas in Iowa they largely supported Obama. It wasn’t a huge leap for them to do so, given that the polls showed they had supported Clinton for months, and had only briefly considered switching to Obama at the end. It didn’t help that some of the more idiotic commentators all but accused her of faking tears on Monday.

2. A real primary. Following Clinton’s defeat in Iowa, her supporters tried to claim that the boutique nature of the Iowa caucuses had worked against their candidate. The caucuses are custom-made for the sort of affluent, well-educated liberal activists who’ve comprised Obama’s base from day one. The idea was that middle- and lower-income working people are less likely to blow an evening at their local caucus. For one thing, they might be working.

Everyone snickered, of course. But it may be that the Clintonistas were right.

3. Depth of support. One aspect to the race that the media completely missed was the longstanding affection New Hampshire Democrats have for the Clintons. When you see polls showing Clinton losing by a double-digit margin, it’s hard to remember that. In the end, though, the idea that voters would abandon her solely on the basis of Obama’s Iowa victory was ludicrous, even if it didn’t seem that way until the results started coming in.

4. The Bradley effect. Maybe. Probably not, though I raised it as an issue last night. But I do hope some enterprising soul spends some time examining the entrails of all the exit polling from New Hampshire.

Howard Kurtz expertly assesses the media lowlights:

This was delicious. The coverage had been so out of control there was speculation about when Hillary might have to drop out. Polls giving Obama an 8- or 10-point lead were accepted as fact. The news surrounding the former first lady had been uniformly negative for days. She’s done everything wrong, Obama has done everything right. She got too emotional in the diner. People just didn’t like her. She campaigned in boring prose and Obama in soaring poetry (to use her analogy). Bill was hurting her. A campaign shakeup was on the way. An era was ending. Some pundits were predicting a 20-point Obama margin.

And then the voters actually went to the polls.

The result: Dewey Defeats Truman.

Will the media ever learn? Will they ever just cover this stuff instead of framing everything within the context of what they think (and hope) is going to happen next? I’m not talking about columnists, commentators or — perish the thought! — bloggers. I’m talking about straight-news reporters who spent five days swooning over Obama as the New New Thing, only to learn that they had missed the story once again.

So, do you want another prediction? I think Clinton has regained most, if not all, of her momentum as the inevitable nominee. If Obama wins the South Carolina primary on Jan. 19 — which he certainly could, given that half the state’s Democratic electorate is African-American — then he could be right back in it. But who really knows?

As Jay Fitzgerald says, channeling Bill Parcells, “That’s why we play the games.”

Photo — obviously not from last night — (cc) by Llima. Some rights reserved.

Clinton and Obama

I’m watching Hillary Clinton’s speech right now, and the atmospherics are interesting. The crowd behind her is much younger than the one that was with her in Iowa, which shows that she learned from Barack Obama’s event last week. For that matter, she looks younger. So does Bill.

Obama’s speech was characteristically excellent, but it differed little from the one he delivered in Iowa. For that matter, it differed little from the one he might have given if he’d won tonight. Could he have been unprepared for defeat?

Clinton’s speech, at least in a surface kind of way, makes me think of McCain’s — pedestrian, but warm enough to compensate. Clinton does not often strike people as warm, so this could prove to be pretty effective.

She’s promising “to end the war in Iraq the right way,” a mild shot at Obama’s unqualified pledge to bring the troops home.

She’s really pushing the youth thing: “I want to thank the young people in New Hampshire who came out. They asked the hard questions, and they voted their hearts and minds. And I really appreciate it.”

So now what? She survived a near-death experience and won New Hampshire, the first and arguably the most important primary. Clearly nobody knows anything, least of all me. I’ll point out only that for the past year, Clinton has seemed like the inevitable nominee with the exception of just the past five days. Now she’s the inevitable nominee once again. Unless and until she isn’t.