The Dish

Dan Balz explains why all the things that went in Obama’s favor in Iowa are actually more prevalent in New Hampshire – especially the power of the Independent vote.

"Nobody would be happier to see all this [negative campaigning] go away than us. But you can’t ask somebody who is at a breathtaking disadvantage in the information coming to the voters to ignore that disadvantage and basically agree to put bullets in their brains," – Bill Clinton, blaming media bias for his wife’s political woes.

Here’s a strange sentence:

Sullivan may try to explain just what was going on in this creepy Iowa fantasy he posted yesterday.

Er: it’s from Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland. That’s a book. Quite well known, actually. And Sullivan has two "l"s.

The New Hampshire pitch:

Jack Shafer spots some posturing on the left.

Jon Chait goes there.

He’s still spinning for Rudy:

The result in Iowa could not have been better for Giuliani tactically. Romney has been injured. Huckabee won, but did not apparently win by a huge margin, and there won’t be many other states where evangelicals make up fully three-fifths of the primary electorate.

My italics. Huckabee beat Romney by nine points in a very crowded field. He got ten times the vote of Rudy. That was a huge margin of victory, however you look at it. The final polls showed a three-point lead. He tripled it. JPod may be right about the next few weeks in general, though I doubt it. But you can’t spin away this victory as anything but huge. Benen comments:

I’ve seen blind optimism, but this is ridiculous.

Clinton’s new line in New Hampshire. It sounds like a veiled reference to the cocaine stuff again.