Tag: Hillary Clinton

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.

Here’s the story. But CNN is holding out.

Is it possible that Barack Obama is falling victim to the Bradley effect? The Bradley effect takes its name from Tom Bradley, the African-American mayor of Los Angeles who was comfortably ahead in the polls in the 1982 California governor’s race.

Bradley ended up losing to a white Republican, George Deukmejian. It turned out that a small but decisive proportion of white voters had told pollsters they were planning to vote for Bradley but in fact ended up voting for Deukmejian. Some speculated that those white voters had lied to pollsters because they didn’t want to be perceived as racists.

Obviously you can vote for Hillary Clinton without being a racist. But the results so far certainly don’t jibe with the polls.

Obama could still win, especially since the college towns’ votes haven’t been counted yet.

On second thought: O-Fish-L, in his inimitable way, argues that it’s not likely Obama suffered from the Bradley effect in a Democratic primary — especially in New Hampshire, whose Democrats are overwhelmingly liberal.