Month: January 2008

It’s a good one, but c’mon.

Needlenose:

Her "last dog dies" moment yesterday helped her as I thought it would, albeit more quickly (I guess wall-to-wall TV coverage trying to turn it into her "Dean scream" may have been an unintended advantage).

And it implies that whoever wins the Democratic nomination in 2008 will have had to earn it. Which is probably a good thing.

Yes, that is a good thing. If Obama wins in the end. <g>.

It’s plausible given the large number of independents. They couldn’t vote for both McCain and Obama. Noam airs the argument here. But remember: the college towns are not in yet.

A reader offers another view of what happened in New Hampshire:

My thoughts as to why Hillary’s been doing well is simpler than yours. I think a lot of NH Dems waited until the last debate to make up their minds, and for Democrats, at least, she came through that night: her rationale as to why she should be the candidate of the party, I thought, was very effective. 

Certainly in the minds of Democrats like me, she became a viable candidate again, despite the fact that if I was a NH resident, I probably would have voted for Obama.

A reader writes:

My parents have been solid Clinton supporters for years, and they are extremely partisan. I have done everything in my power over the past six months to convince them to vote for Obama.

They finally started to move towards him over the past few weeks. Then my mother told me last night that the debate over the weekend in NH was so great – better than a debate has been in such a long time – that they simply didn’t want the discussion to end.  They felt it was too soon. The desire to see more discussion meshed with the media hype of "it will be over," leading them to believe that if they voted for Obama, the democratic primaries would be over. When this combined with the fact that they are old-ish and didn’t stay up to watch Obama’s Iowa acceptance speech (and weren’t impressed with his debating), they swung back to Clinton.

A reader writes:

After all your postulating about Obamamania I’m visualizing Hillary wearing a strap-on with New Hampshire emblazoned on it, and you bowing before her.

Obama is still ahead, according to New Hampshire resident Mark Steyn:

The Hillary "revival" seems confined for the most part to Manchester and Nashua. In Concord, Obama won decisively, and in small towns he seems to be winning by almost two-to-one margins.

Ross examines the tears of the New Hampshire campaign.

After everything, this is McCain’s night. After the awful news about Ron Paul’s ugly, repellent past newsletters, I find myself rooting again for the man who was my second choice. He did this from scratch, after his campaign bottomed out last summer. He faced a much-better financed establishment candidate in Romney, he stuck with his immigration position, he kept up a schedule that would have drained a man half his age, and he stuck with the surge, a tactic that worked far better in damping down violence than I expected, even if it has not achieved its critical political objectives.

The Democratic race is riveting – as women seem to be backing Clinton much more emphatically than they did in Iowa. But this is McCain’s night. His victory over Romney was a very, very big one. Right now, it looks like a 7 point lead. That’s decisive.

Mitt Romney’s strategy was to win the first states with his overwhelming money advantage and organization. He has lost Iowa and lost New Hampshire – decisively. Giuliani is sinking fast. Maybe Romney can persuade the Republican machine to help him in South Carolina, but Huckabee is very strong there. This is beginning to look like a McCain-Huckabee race.

(Photo: Kevin Cox/Getty.)

There’s one other possible explanation for the apparent Clinton revival in the last few days. Maybe Democrats decided that a sudden blowout for Obama wasn’t good for their party. Maybe they wanted to see Obama fight some more, to keep the contest more competitive, to give their candidates more testing for the fall. Maybe they just wanted to say: "Wait. A tidal wave is no way to select a candidate. We need to see both of them fight on under the kind of pressure they will face in the fall."

I’m thinking out loud. But I suspect that Clinton’s frankness, desperation, emotional volatility, temper and vulnerability these past three days pushed some to keep her campaign alive. I have my views and I sit here and bloviate. But I do respect the democratic process. The point of our system is that the people get to decide. They are.