Tag: New Hampshire

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.

McCain’s speech

Warm but stilted. John McCain is far better interacting with a crowd or giving interviews than he is delivering a speech. He always sounds like he’s reading it, and he never sounds like he’s totally into it. He gave a perfectly fine speech tonight, but he didn’t take advantage of the moment quite to the degree he could have.

I thought Mitt Romney’s speech was better than usual. Is he finished? It’s hard to believe otherwise. Back in October, Ryan Lizza wrote in the New Yorker:

[Romney] must win the early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, states where he has been leading in the polls, and create enough momentum and media attention to carry him through to February 5th, when some twenty states will vote — including New York and California, where Romney is barely known.

He held a huge lead in both states for months, then blew it at the end. He is, as the pundits are pointing out, the only Massachusetts governor or senator ever to lose the New Hampshire primary.

I’m sure Romney will continue at least until Super Tuesday, Feb. 5. But I’ve got to believe that it’s over.

The Obama effect

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.

McCain widens lead (or not)

For what it’s worth — and it’s probably not worth much, given the volatility of such things — Zogby is reporting that John McCain is now leading Mitt Romney in New Hampshire by a margin of 36 percent to 27 percent, up from 34 percent to 29 percent in the previous tracking poll. This could mean that McCain has managed to stop Romney’s mini-comeback. More likely it means nothing at all.

Enough for Obama and McCain?

If the turnout predictions reported by Boston.com’s James Pindell turn out to be accurate — or, as he thinks, prove to be on the low side — then there should be enough independent votes out there to float Barack Obama and John McCain. Pundits have been looking at the independent vote as a zero-sum game, and as Obama has risen, McCain has dropped back a bit closer to Mitt Romney. But that may not be the way things work out.

Channeling no one but himself

New York Times reporter Michael Powell asserts that John McCain is borrowing rhetoric from Barack Obama. Yet in his only example, he shows that McCain is borrowing from himself:

Mr. McCain admits to admiring Mr. Obama’s appeal as a “wonderful thing” and has taken to borrowing a line or three. He has been channeling Mr. Obama, calling on Americans to “serve a cause greater than their self-interest,” a theme from his campaign in 2000.

Indeed it is a theme from McCain’s 2000 campaign. So why does Powell say that McCain is “channeling Mr. Obama”?