Monday night, as I was preparing to watch Ohio State get its predictable beat-down in the BCS championship, the talking heads were absolutely convinced that Hillary was about to suffer the same fate in New Hampshire and were even speculating about how much longer her campaign would continue. Dutiful Midwesterners that they are, the Buckeyes followed the script, but, for some reason, Ms. Clinton refused to go along. Some polls put Barack Obama as much as 10 points ahead in New Hampshire, but Wednesday morning headlines hailed “Hill and Bill” as “the Comeback Kids.”
The favorite tactic of those who had already written Hillary off was to blame the pollsters. It’s certainly true that hastily conducted surveys in primary elections where voters are just becoming engaged with candidates are not always reliable, but this is a fact of which the punditry should be well aware, and they were nonetheless willing to use such polling data to prophesy Ms. C’s imminent demise.
As to actual events and doings in New Hampshire that might have affected the outcome, there was, of course, Hillary’s use of the gender card to suggest that, for all of Obama’s talk about change, as the first really serious presidential candidate of the female persuasion, she was, in fact, the flesh and blood embodiment of change. Then there was the much-replayed video of Hillary showing her emotions and even flirting with tears. More than one observer has expressed skepticism about the sincerity of this display, which came after weeks of being characterized as cold and unfeeling and immediately on the heels of being asked point-blank about how it felt to be less “likable” than her major opponent, Senator Obama. (I’m not exactly a big fan, but I’m not prepared to say that she was flatly faking it on this occasion. On the other hand, it seems to me that the byword for her whole campaign has been “The key to spontaneity is preparation.”) It would be ironic indeed if, having spent much of both her Senate career and her presidential campaign to date trying to show men she’s as macho as the next guy, Ms. Clinton manages to salvage her prospects by showing women her softer feminine side.
The always irritating Chris Matthews of MSNBC is confident that Obama’s polling numbers were inflated by a fairly common “fudge factor” that results from whites telling pollsters they support a black candidate but voting otherwise once the curtains are pulled in the booth. This failure to follow through would’ve been less likely to operate in the Iowa caucuses where everyone’s preferences were visible to everyone else. Matthews may be right, although we won’t know until we can compare Obama’s primary totals to his polling numbers in several more primary states. It would be interesting to see how he would fare among blue collar white voters in next week’s Michigan primary, but he took his name off the ballot there after the national Democratic Party organization pulled Michigan’s delegates because the state is holding its primary earlier than it was supposed to. (The penalties for “premature evaluation” are fairly stiff, it seems. [OUCH!] The GOP has taken away half of Michigan’s delegates for the same reason.) Obama’s crew is urging Michiganders to vote “uncommitted,” but a helluva lot of them will have to do that to keep Hillary from claiming she won a great victory next Tuesday.
The issue of race has certainly been muted, to say the least, within the Obama campaign itself, and many established black leaders, including Georgia congressman John Lewis, have endorsed Ms. Clinton, due in part, no doubt, to the perception of Obama’s un-electability, not to mention the popularity with African Americans of her husband, the old hipster from Hope himself. The Iowa outcome, however, made Sen. Obama look a little less like the candidate of the impossible dreamers, and the sense that whites started ganging up on him once he emerged as a serious contender might well trigger a significant “blacklash” with implications for Ms. Clinton in states like South Carolina, where Obama currently leads in the polls and in Georgia, where the two appear to be locked in a virtual dead heat.
Here we are with the polls again. We can’t live without ‘em, in football or politics, it seems, but in either case, there’s recent evidence to suggest we better not bet the farm on them either.
