"Just because you won the Silver medal in one event doesn’t mean you can’t come back and win the gold," – Romney last night.
"Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said yesterday that in order to win the White House he needs to win both New Hampshire and Iowa," – Manchester Union-Leader, December 22.
A lot of Democrats like Frank Foer were worried about that with Obama. Does he have a killer instinct on the campaign trail? Well, yes. But not in a bad way. And it’s hard to argue with his ability to campaign hard and take down a giant after last night.
Publius is right about the concept, but wrong about the timing:
The media loathes Clinton – and the feeling is mutual. The press has been waiting for this fall from grace moment, and now they have it. And so they’ll pound on her for the next few days, but then they’ll have it out of their system and her coverage might improve. At the least, they’ll want to keep the horse race going.
But it will be an Obama-love fest for a while. The only way for Clinton to survive the pro-Obama wave is to become the grinch. She has to be careful not to go too negative against Obama, but she can hardly leave him alone either. It’s a much tougher road than some seem to think.
"The Hawkeye State has not been helpful. If the nominees really turn out to be Huckabee and Obama, the paternalists will have won long before November. And the jihadis will not have done too badly either," – Tigerhawk.
After four terms of Southerners in the White House, maybe this is what we’re looking for:
When you listen to Obama, the substance of thinking, the cadence of his reasoning, his unassuming acceptance of people, you hear a Midwesterner.
"What I see in Iowa are a lot the qualities I love in Illinois," Obama told me in an interview. "I think there’s a truth to the idea that there’s a Midwestern sensibility and that people don’t like a lot of fuss, don’t like a lot of pretense, and I think are much more likely to think about things pragmatically and how do you get the job done as opposed to having a lot of ideology driving decision-making. And I think that’s what America needs right now."
An Obama supporter reports that Obama won Tom Vilsack’s Des Moines precinct by a margin of two — and that the former governor and his wife, Christie, a major Clinton backer, didn’t show.
That’s more of an eruption than a caucus.
Americans are not going to want to see this stopped. When an African-American man is leading a juggernaut to the White House, do you want to be the one to stand up and say No?
Clinton has to in order to win. Hence her very difficult predicament this morning.
My take. The outlook is grim. Deservedly so.
Leonard Cohen’s Democracy, which I reprinted in full yesterday. If you don’t know it, check it out. It’s been in my head for a day now, and particularly as the results came in last night:
I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
