These notes on the election results in New Hampshire yesterday were written before those results were in — even before the polls had closed. Why let so minor a detail stand in the way?
Projecting early returns from Dixville Notch and Hart's Location, N.H., those key global listening posts, and guided by the results of every public opinion poll (just like some of the candidates), but mainly using my own matchless political intuition (matchlessly bad), I assumed that Barack Obama would continue his march to another victory through snowy terrain. As Iowa goes, so goes New Hampshire.
On the same shaky grounds, I assumed that John McCain would lead the Republican pack. If it's clear by the time you're reading this, Gentle and Forgiving Reader, that I've seriously miscalculated, then you've got an election-year souvenir to hold onto for the ages, like the priceless Chicago Tribune's DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN early edition back in 1948. And the laugh will be on me. As it so often is.
The Clintonistas were regrouping yesterday even before the returns were in. Completely unsubstantiated word was that James Carville was joining Clinton femme's staff, along with Paul Begala, in hopes of yet turning this winter of discontent into glorious summer. Both denied it. But never mind, there are plenty of other talented hatchet men around.
Hillary Clinton will now go into hunker-down mode to rethink and recover. But rather than Washington's winter at Valley Forge, a more apt metaphor might be Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. The political guerrillas lie in ambush — nothing brings them out like the smell of impending defeat — and have already begun sniping. It's about as cheerful a sight as buzzards circling over carrion.
I'm not sure which is sadder — the smugness of her critics or the infighting that must now be going on inside the Clinton camp. Bill must be having kittens by now while everybody else scurries to blame everybody else.
It was a bleak omen when Bill Clinton couldn't even draw a decent crowd in New Hampshire as the political groupies, like iron filings to a magnet, were swamping Obama rallies. As for Miss Hillary post-Iowa and New Hampshire, will she ever be able to stand the sight of snow again? What a blank look defeat can have.
The Comeback Kids didn't come back this time. A long-time political operative and friend (I keep low company) explained the other night how things were supposed to go for Miss Hillary. After a triumphant progress through the Iowa caucuses, her sense of entitlement in tow, this year's Clinton would gain enough momentum to seal her victory in New Hampshire before landing the knockout punch in South Carolina. She got only one small detail wrong: She's the one about to be knocked out.
The best-laid plans of presidential candidates go aft awry, for if there's one thing to be expected in politics as in life, it's the unexpected.
As for those now sure that Hillary Clinton is finished, they might profit by noting that only last summer John McCain, his campaign in disarray, was supposed to be finished, too. The too-sure might take note, though of course they never do.
But what will all those advisers advise The Candidate as they circle around her to give aid and comfort? Advice being the cheapest coin in current circulation, I'm glad to offer the lady some myself at no charge whatsoever, confident it's worth the price:
Lay off Kid Obama. He's a heckuva counter-puncher, if a light one in the current featherweight style of political rhetoric. (We live in an era of politics and everything else lite.) After he's delivered his comeback, his lady opponent must feel like she's drowining in a fine souffle.
Look what happened when Sen./Mrs. Clinton said something about her young opponent's raising "false hopes" about what he could do for his country. Uh oh.
She shouldn't have gone there — or anywhere near there. Her suave young opponent made the immediate connection between himself and A.) the late, sainted John F. Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon, and B.) Martin Luther King Jr.'s envisioning the end of racial segregation. It was a one-two punch, evoking two now hallowed names in the popular canon.
"If anything crystallized what this campaign is about," said The Kid, "it was that right there. Some are thinking of our constraints, and some are thinking about our limitless possibilities."
How long before this young comer calls on the shade of Robert F. Kennedy, too? "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not."
Above all, don't mention his youthful inexperience. You'll just provoke the young of all ages now gathering around him. For who now is building the bridge to the 21st century? Looking to the past won't work. Just as it didn't for poor Bob Dole. America is the land of the future, and always will be.
So what should Hillary Clinton do? Emphasize her strengths. Surely she has some somewhere. Talk about health care in the sure confidence that the public has forgotten her unfortunate foray into that wilderness of a subject in the early, collapsing months of the first Clinton administration. That was long ago, and there is no electorate as amnesiac as the American one.
This doesn't mean Hillary Clinton can't go after her young opponent's vacuous record and even more vacuous comments. Just have her more aggressive surrogates spread the vicious word. If not James Carville and Paul Begala, those old warhorses, others must already be pulling at the reins.
In the meantime, The Candidate can go in search of empathy. She's already shed a tear or two, understandably enough. She needs to pretend she's granting an interview with the sappiest women's magazine around when being interviewed by supposed tough guys like Chris Matthews. They'll be putty in her calculating hands.
As for old John McCain, if the final round of this presidential round-robin turns out to be between him and young Barack Obama, he's going to have the same youth-vs.-age problem as Senator Clinton, only more so.
I can see his speechwriters even now dusting off Ronald Reagan's response when some media type asked him if he didn't think he was too old to be running for the demanding job of president of the United States: "I want you to know I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience."
After that, nobody dared mention his supposed advanced age again. Take that, Barack Obama.
So much for money's being the mother's milk of politics. Hillary Clinton is said to have $100 million in her campaign kitty, and all Mitt Romney has to do is write a check on his own vast account, yet both are foundering, swimming in dollars but short of votes. Politics may not be all about money after all. Maybe it's about the candidate.Choose the right one and the money will follow. Right about now Barack Obama is probably having to beat off all the contributors who hope to become one of his 100,000 or so closest friends when he's inaugurated.
In the words of that greatest political analyst of American elections — no, not some Frenchie named Tocqueville, but that honest-to-God, Amuhrican-as-apple-lasagna hero, Yogi Berra — it ain't over till it's over. Stay tuned.
