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http://www.sethabramson.blogspot.com/...feel free to agree or disagree, either here or on the blog(!)
A Post-Mortem: Five Reasons Barack Obama Lost the New Hampshire Primary(Hint: None of the Reasons Were His Fault)Here are the top five reasons Obama lost to Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary, 39% to 37%. You'll notice none of these reasons have anything to do with Obama's viability or skill as a political candidate.
1.
John Edwards. Before it's all said and done tonight, 60,000+ voters in New Hampshire will have cast ballots for one of three candidates: John Edwards, Bill Richardson, and Dennis Kucinich. The vast majority of these votes will have gone to Edwards, the most progressive candidate in the race except for Kucinich (whose voters account, incidentally, for only about 3,000 of those 60,000 votes). Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama in New Hampshire by about 6,000 votes. Does anyone in America doubt that without Edwards, Richardson, and Kucinich in the race, those 60,000 almost-entirely-progressive voters would have favored Obama over Clinton by a wide enough margin to give Obama a win in New Hampshire? No, no one doubts that--but because Edwards finished with a disappointing (yet not entirely unpredictable, given previous polls) 17% in New Hampshire, no one thinks to consider the importance of Edwards tonight, and point out that in a two-person race Obama would have actually (as those same polls once predicted) have blown Hillary's doors off in the Granite State. Today's result was devastating for Edwards; he was hoping for a Hillary loss, such that he could soldier on, watch Hillary drop out, and go into hand-to-hand combat mode with Obama. The joke, of course, is on Edwards, and those of us who support him, as his continued presence in the presidential race only ensures that he'll never see his best-case scenario materialize. John Edwards has become the biggest obstacle to John Edwards' own ambitions--strategically speaking--which is what tells me, sadly, that it's time for him to drop out of the race. The penalty for all of us, if he fails to do so, is the eminently beatable Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008.
2.
The media. Nothing is worse for a candidate than a premature coronation, and that's what the media saddled Obama with yesterday. Undoubtedly, the media effectively calling the race for Obama yesterday--all but saying to America that the only issue left was how much he'd win by--depressed turnout for Obama while raising it for Clinton. Obama voters had every reason to believe, because they'd been told this by every poll and every pundit, that Obama no longer needed their vote. And Clinton supporters knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that their preferred choice needed them as never before. Obama's surrogates, particularly Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, made a last-ditch effort today, on the airwaves of New England, to emphasize to Obama voters that their vote was still desperately needed. That message was too little, too late, and as it turns out the Obama bump from his Iowa victory was, if anything, too big. So big the media salivation turned into overreaction, which turned into smugness and complacency among precisely those voters Obama's Iowa bump should have energized. As with the John Edwards effect, there's an undeniable irony here--almost a paradox--in that it was Obama's very success in Iowa (where he outpolled Hillary by 9%; compare that to Hillary's squeaker of a win tonight <2%>) that cost him New Hampshire. Yet, once again, was this Obama's fault? No. His only failure was not realizing that the national media was, and is, and always will be, more powerful than any single campaign's GOTV machine.
3.
The "diner" moment. Hillary's close-to-tears confession in a New Hampshire diner yesterday that this race was "personal" for her had countless effects on the electorate, all of them positive for Hillary. And yet I'm not saying the moment was contrived or false; in fact, I believe it was genuine, and well-timed but not in a schemed-out way (well-timed in the same way fate is well-timed; it's no surprise, really, that 24 hours before the New Hampshire primary, as Hillary faced the probable end of her national political career, she would feel so exhausted and harried and depressed and disappointed that her voice would crack for all of ten seconds. That's just the way life, and the human psyche, works). Women realized, when Hillary teared up, that she was not merely a machine, or a woman ashamed of her femininity and trying to "be a man" in a man's world, but that she was a woman like them, trying to do the hardest thing any woman in American history has tried to do (quite possibly): become the most powerful person in the known universe. And it's no surprise, then, in a sense, that women went for Hillary overwhelmingly today in New Hampshire, and gave her a clear (albeit narrow) victory. Likewise, Hillary's tears at that diner brought out two types of television pundits and on-the-ground activists--bigots and cynics--and both these groups can't help but push voters toward precisely those candidates they most vehemently oppose. Thank the man who raised a sign saying "Iron My Shirt!" at a Hillary rally for Hillary's win; thank pundits like Chris Matthews, and other old, chauvinistic white men on the boob tube, who openly wondered whether a) Hillary's tears were contrived (I don't think the voting public felt they were, generally), and b) whether those tears signaled she somehow wasn't ready to lead the most powerful nation on earth. That unparalleled, bald-faced assault on the very humanity of a tough and courageous woman couldn't have had any other effect than to turn out voters for her. That, and the moment in that diner really was touching; I've never felt so warmly toward Hillary, though admittedly that's not saying much.
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(Continued at link above).
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