Panic in Year Zero

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4

Sliming the Obamas
2008-02-20 15:15:00
Barack Obama, as expected, took care of business yesterday in Wisconsin and Hawai'i, assuring Hillary Clinton two more weeks of negative publicity and a potential date with political oblivion on March 4. Without victories in Ohio and Texas, it becomes hard to imagine a calculus by which she wins the Democratic nomination. A blowout in one state (perhaps Ohio) combined with a narrow loss in the other might be enough to keep her going, but she'd probably still need to run the table, or come close, for the rest of the primary season.Meanwhile, the country began to receive an unpleasant taste of what the Republicans have in store for a November campaign against the current frontrunner. It began when Michelle Obama, who is not running for anything, tried to convey to a friendly audience just how much her husband's success meant to the country. Here's what she said: "For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country, because it feels like hope is making a comeba...

Why Obama Must Win Tonight
2008-02-19 14:16:00
Barack Obama is clearly the frontrunner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. He could, if things line up right, essentially eliminate his only remaining rival, Hillary Clinton, in exactly two weeks, when the voters of Ohio and Texas go to the polls. He maintains a strong lead in committed delegates, while Senator Clinton's hold on the party's Super Delegates becomes more tenuous by the minute.Nevertheless, I am going to go out on a limb this morning: Wisconsin, which holds its primary election today, represents a must-win state for the Obama campaign.How can that be? Surely, all the pressure is now on Clinton as she fights back from her late February slump and tries to salvage some measure of credibility before staring down a potential March 4 Waterloo. All Senator Obama has to do, according to the conventional wisdom, is win either Ohio, Texas, or (in April) Pennsylvania and his May-December battle with John McCain will officially be on.I dispute none of th...
More About: Tonight

Super Delegates and Fairness
2008-02-18 13:15:00
All this discussion of Democratic Super Delegates begins to approach absurdity. Most annoying is the question of fairness. Is it fair, ask about a million journalists per hour, that after all the voting and caucusing, the Super Delegates may decide who wins the nomination?First, that is an unbelievably stupid question. Of course it’s fair. The rules were written well in advance, all the candidates understood those rules, and nothing has changed in the interim. Is it fair that one basketball team can make fewer shots than another and still win the game because more of their baskets came from beyond the three-point line? Yes, obviously it is since that’s what the rule book prescribes.There are three problems here that all intersect to create the current controversy. First, the news media have done a characteristically poor job of explaining how the Democratic nomination system works. By neglecting to discuss the role of Super Delegates until the campaign between Hillary Clinton an...
More About: Fairness

Pistol Packin' Profs
2008-02-17 15:08:00
You’ve probably heard the civil libertarian’s motto that the best response to bad speech is more speech. Now, thanks to the efforts of several state legislators, this First Amendment mantra has a Second Amendment equivalent. According to lawmakers in several jurisdictions, the best response to bad guns is more guns.As soon as the terrible news emerged about the killings at Northern Illinois University, you knew it would only be a matter of time before someone suggested arming students and professors as a means of protection. Enter Stacey Campfield of the Tennessee House of Representatives, who recommends that anyone licensed to carry a concealed weapon should be allowed to bring it to class. “You're just advertising to the crazies where they can go for the easy pickings," said the Knoxville Republican, "where they are going to face no resistance, where it's going to be taking sheep and leading them to the slaughter."It is unclear how that makes college campuses any different...

You're No JFK (We Hope)
2008-02-16 13:58:00
Yesterday, I argued that Barack Obama's candidacy remninded me of Jimmy Carter's run for the White House in 1976. I realize, of course, that this is not a flattering comparison, at least in retrospect. Carter's presidency did not go well, and his re-election bid was doomed almost from the start. Indeed, only fears about Ronald Reagan's trigger-happiness kept the race close until the final week.The preferred analogy in Obama-land is to 1960 and John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was an attractive, young, charismatic senator who challenged one of the great prejudices of his day. Nearly half a century later, it is hard to understand the impact of Catholicism on that year's presidential election. I was too young to remember the election itself, but I do recall my next door neighbor, on the weekend after the president's assassination, finding my sister and me playing in the backyard on a Saturday morning--no cartoons were broadcast that day--and saying, almost gleefully, "Ain't you kids sor...
More About: Hope

The Bicentennial Obama
2008-02-15 13:41:00
There have been, in my memory, three "change" candidates in American politics, at least on the Democratic side. Barack Obama is the fourth. In each case, the politician in question emerged from obscurity virtually overnight, promised new ideas and a fresh perspective, and became suddenly popular even before he was particularly well known. Bill Clinton, a young and charismatic governor, offered an escape from twelve years of the divisive politics of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in 1992. Eight years before that, Gary Hart electrified the political world with his startling takedown of veteran pol Walter Mondale in the 1984 New Hampshire primary. Hart was, like Obama today, the sudden darling of the young, educated, upper-middle-class voters we used to call yuppies. Hollywood adored him, too.Neither Clinton nor Hart, however, proves a particularly good match for Senator Obama. Clinton had enjoyed a certain level of buzz for a number of years before capturing the Democratic nominat...

Culture Warrior Day at the Ballpark
2008-02-14 15:04:00
OK, I give up. I absolutely just give up. I despise the culture wars. I hate the idea that every time they have even the slightest opening, culture warriors choose up sides and turn some politically insignificant matter into yet another hackneyed 60's-style battle between left and right.Take the Duke lacrosse case, for example. This was the very definition of a local concern. A bunch of boorish white athletes went and hired a couple of African American exotic dancers for the evening. Things went bad from there (imagine that!), racial slurs were possibly exchanged, and one of the women ended up charging several players with sexual assault. A few Duke professors scribbled a poorly written and ill-informed screed about the case, perhaps trying to reassure women and students of color, perhaps simply self-righteously flexing their left wing. Maybe both. Their role, however, was trivial next to that of an ambitious D.A. who cut corners, played fast and loose with evidence, and made outra...
More About: Culture , Ballpark , Warrior

Hillary's Last Stand
2008-02-13 14:35:00
It is no longer possible to overstate the trouble in which Hillary Clinton's campaign finds itself. Her losses yesterday in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., surprised nobody, but the one-sidedness of the results seemed to stagger even a generally anti-Hillary press corps. The trio of elections favored Barack Obama, of course, coming as they did in places with both sizable African American populations and large numbers of highly educated, upper-middle-class white voters. But Obama won at least 60% of the vote in all three jurisdictions, a figure he could not have achieved without performing exceptionally well outside of his two base constituencies. It is no longer a matter of hype and momentum: Senator Obama has started to pull ahead in a decisive manner.Simply put, if Senator Clinton is to remain competitive in the race for the Democratic nomination, something must change between now and March 4 when her firewall states of Texas and Ohio hold their primaries. There are thr...
More About: Stand

Why Huckabee Won't Quit
2008-02-12 14:29:00
Yesterday's question of the day, at least over at CNN, involved Mike Huckabee 's insistence on continuing his campaign for president in the face of overwhelming odds against him. One reporter indicated that Huckabee would need to win 93% of remaining Republican delegates in order to capture the nomination, something that will obviously not occur. The candidate himself did his best Yogi Berra impression, insisting that it's not over 'till it's over, but even he must know by now that the fat lady has sung, the audience has dispersed, the opera house has been shuttered, and the devastating reviews have been published in the morning trades.It seems clear that the GOP leadership is none too happy with Huckabee's decision to stick around. His presence, in and of itself, does not embarrass the party's presumptive nominee, but every victory the former Arkansas governor racks up represents a further rebuke of John McCain's conservative credentials. This past Saturday was particularly ...
More About: Quit

More on Caucuses
2008-02-11 12:56:00
Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos website, has one of the savviest political minds in the liberal blogosphere. He recognized the transformative potential of the internet while most party pros were still learning to master their Hotmail accounts. Moulitsas knows his way around electoral politics and quite obviously recognizes the difference between a primary election and a caucus. Sunday afternoon, however, he made the following statement:"Obama should win [the Maine caucuses] by double digits which would be a stunning defeat for a Clinton campaign that by all reports should've been able to replicate its New Hampshire success in this state."New Hampshire, of course, held a primary election—not a caucus—last month in which Hillary Clinton shocked the pollsters by defying their predictions and defeating Barack Obama rather handily. Had Maine, which shares its western border with New Hampshire, decided to inaugurate its own primary, Moulitsas's comparison would have been ...
More About: Caucuses

Sunshine Superwoman
2008-01-28 13:45:00
Immediately after Florida's laughably inept performance in November, 2000, I probably would have supported a constitutional amendment banning the Sunshine State from participating in the next five presidential elections. And that was before anyone knew just how disastrous the result would be. I'm mostly past that now, but I still haven't forgotten that the incompetence of Florida voters and the corruption of their elected officials have resulted, at least indirectly, in the needless loss of nearly 4,000 American lives, the denigration of the Bill of Rights, the worldwide humiliation of our country, and the stain of torture on our national reputation. Oh yeah, and an economic policy that has buried our grandchildren in debt, diminished our standard of living, and reduced our currency to the point that Europeans use shredded dollar bills as confetti at their weddings.OK, so maybe I'm not entirely over it after all.Regardless, for better or for worse (and by that, I mean for worse)...
More About: Superwoman

Oh No, Mr. Bill!
2008-01-27 15:25:00
Before we all get too excited about ex-presidents and the level of decorum that we should expect from them, let's first take a deep breath and remember this little nugget from former President Harry Truman:"Nixon is a shifty-eyed goddamn liar, and people know it. He's one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides."Suffice it say that nothing Bill Clinton has said on the campaign trail in 2008 has quite reached that level of invective.In yesterday's Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall presents the You Tube video of Bill Clinton "discounting Barack Obama's expected victory in South Carolina by explaining that Jesse Jackson won the state twice". Marshall's headline: "Try to Explain This".Well, OK, Josh, I'll take a swing at it. I'd say that Mr. Clinton was doing what candidates and their surrogates have done since this ridiculous era of sequential primary elections commenced...

Identity Politics and the 2008 Election
2008-01-26 14:51:00
Back in our nation's bicentennial year, something unusual happened. Alabama and South Carolina voted for the Democratic nominee for president of the United States. So did every other state of the old Confederacy except Virginia. Mississippi and Massachusetts cast their electoral votes for the same man, Jimmy Carter. Carter was clearly more liberal than his Republican opponent, Gerald Ford, though the distance between them was not enormous. Still, the South rejected the GOP in 1976 and cast its lot with a left of center Democrat. It has not done so since.It is because of the 1976 election that many pundits believe Ronald Reagan deserves most of the credit for turning southern voters away from a century of supporting Democrats at the national level. Those with a bit more knowledge, however, understand that the turning point actually occurred sixteen years earlier with the doomed campaign of Barry Goldwater. Aside from his native Arizona, Goldwater won only five additional states in ...
More About: Politics , Election , Identity , Identity Politics , 2008

Can Anyone Spare Some Change?
2008-01-25 14:24:00
If you have spent even five minutes listening to the cable TV news broadcasters, you know by now that 2008 will be a Change Election. This is, of course, simply another way of saying that the electorate is fed up with the incumbent president. There isn't a lot of variety here: you have your Change Elections, and you have your Don't-Need-to-Change elections. The latter favor the party in power, and the former do not. This is fairly common knowledge, even if pundits' pronouncements often sound as though someone has finally decoded the Rosetta Stone.Still, nothing is certain. The "out" party occasionally wins a Don't Change election, usually because their opponent fails to run on the incumbent's record. Think Al Gore in 2000, who foolishly fell for all that talk about "Clinton Fatigue" that dominated commentary that year (yeah, I know, Gore really won the election, but it shouldn't have even been close). It is more difficult to think of an incumbent party nominee winning a Change...

When Negative Turns Nuclear
2008-01-24 15:04:00
For the most part, I have been unmoved by the breathless concerns of pundits about the growing dispute between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Nobody could have expected that the race for the Democratic nomination would stay positive from beginning to end. We are dealing with preternaturally ambitious people here, both of whom have the chance to fulfill their greatest personal dream. Within reason, we should expect them to do whatever it takes to win. If that means getting personal, making veiled accusations of corruption, or malfeasance, or incompetence, then those charges will be leveled. If it requires dancing dangerously close to the exposed wire of race in America, then dance they shall. As I mentioned previously, if nothing else, this is good preparation for the war that awaits when the Republican hit machine starts firing up later this year.But there are limits, and Senator Obama may have crossed one yesterday. Speaking to a reporter from CBN (Pat Robertson's "network"), t...
More About: Nuclear , Negative

2004 Redux?
2008-01-23 15:09:00
To listen to the cable TV pundits, you would think that John McCain's comeback from several months of electoral oblivion represents the greatest turnaround in American political history. In fact, this sort of thing happens all the time. Immediately, of course, we think of Harry Truman and his defeat of Thomas Dewey in 1948, an upset memorialized in that famously mistaken Chicago Tribune headline ("Dewey Defeats Truman") from the morning after his victory.In fact, McCain's accomplishment comes nowhere close to rivaling that of Truman, a man who held the underdog label from the start of the campaign until the very last vote was counted. McCain, by contrast, actually enjoyed frontrunner status during the early months of 2007. In that sense, his return from the dead most closely parallels the fate of John Kerry four years ago.Like McCain, Kerry was the clubhouse leader whose inaugural voyage into presidential waters went poorly. His early campaign was so unimpressive that, by December...

Let's Get Ready to Rumble!!!
2008-01-22 14:51:00
I have sometimes wondered, usually when otherwise unoccupied and holding a malt beverage, where we came up with the cliché about the gloves coming off. This phrase, of course, is generally applied by lazy political journalists to any situation in which previously friendly—or at least circumspect—opponents finally begin to level personal attacks against one another. It could be a boxing metaphor, a reference to bare-knuckled pugilism, as opposed to the use of the regulation padded handgear that scrambles men's brains more gently and gradually. Or, perhaps the source is the sport of hockey, in which every serious fight is preceded by players dropping those large, unwieldy gloves that protect critical body parts, but lend themselves poorly to fisticuffs. I suppose I could find the answer on the web, but I guess I don't really care all that much after all.In any event, as I sampled the usual news and politics websites this morning, I wondered how long it would take me to find the...
More About: Ready , Get Ready

Happy MLK Day!
2008-01-21 14:42:00
Through the twisted logic of Monday holidays, we celebrate Dr. King's birthday today, nearly a week after he would have turned 79. I have no idea how the Reverend might have felt about this, but I'd like to think he would have approved. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a great advocate of working class Americans; indeed, he was in Memphis on that terrible April day in 1968 to express his support for a strike by local sanitation workers. I suspect that the benefits of a three-day weekend for those who labor would appeal to him.This morning's headline on CNN.com suggests that the "popular view of MLK [is] losing complexity". I haven't read the article, but the point is well taken. On the one hand, of course, this is to be expected. Transcendent historical figures are nearly always reduced, to some extent, to the sum of their most popular traits. Thus, Abraham Lincoln is the Great Emancipator, ignoring the man's clearly stated ambivalence about issues of race and slavery. Harry Truman...
More About: Happy

Six Down, 45 1/2 to Go
2008-01-20 15:33:00
Seven things we learned yesterday from Nevada and South Carolina (the reference to 45 ½, by the way, denotes the fact that South Carolina Democrats have yet to cast their ballots):1. On the one hand, the Democratic race for president remains a tossup. All that we learned for certain yesterday is that John Edwards' name will not be on the general election ballot in November. Not only does his third place finish in the strongly pro-union state of Nevada spell the effective conclusion of his presidential ambitions, but snow will fall in Honolulu before either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton name the former vice presidential candidate to the ticket for a second time—nobody wants to be associated, even indirectly, with John Kerry's pathetic 2004 bid for the White House. Edwards will probably hang on through next week's South Carolina primary (it's his native state), but anything other than a highly unlikely first place finish will likely have him dropping out before the Super Tues...

On Media Bias
2008-01-19 15:30:00
Over on the sporting pitch, controversy, as usual, envelops the announcement of the latest voting for membership in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Many of the arguments contest the qualifications of one Jim Rice, a Boston Red Sox slugger from the 1970s and 1980s. To a large extent, the debate centers around whether Rice's impressive statistics were impressive enough for enshrinement, given that a) he had a relatively short career, and b) he was a right-handed power hitter who played his home games in a ballpark that disproportionately favored righties.But the most interesting feature of the dispute involves the alleged role of certain grudge-bearing sportswriters in denying Rice his plaque in Cooperstown. It seems that the selection of each year's class of Hall of Famers is determined primarily by a vote of members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America, at least those scribes who have belonged to that organization for at least a decade. Evidently, Mr. Rice did not possess t...
More About: Media , Media Bias , Bias

Obama Goes Negative (Sort of)
2008-01-18 14:27:00
Let's say you're the candidate who has promised to bring our country together. You've pledged to elevate the tone of American politics and to avoid the sort of bickering and mudslinging that has alienated so many citizens—especially young citizens—over the past quarter century. Not only has this position allowed you to flourish in the race for the presidency, but it also made you, at least briefly, the frontrunner for your party's nomination. But now your most serious opponent is busy scoring points against you by going negative and questioning your preparation for higher office. How do you fight back without undoing your hard-won image as the good guy, the uniter in a world of dividers?If you're Barack Obama , you do so by praising Ronald Reagan.Speaking to reporters in Reno, Nevada, Obama startled the Democratic faithful by asserting that the Gipper "changed the trajectory" of American politics and provided voters with the sort of leadership they craved during the 1980...
More About: Sort , Negative

Right Idea, Wrong Carolina
2008-01-17 14:43:00
North Dakota and South Dakota are, in the eyes of most Americans, largely indistinguishable. One has a mountain covered with presidential faces, the other a Peace Garden that exists so far off the beaten path that few people south of Bismarck have ever seen it (but the license plates continue to insist it's there). But to most U.S. citizens, both Dakotas conjure images of cold, underpopulated farmland, inhabited by hardy souls of Scandinavian extraction who are, by turn, grimly stoic and warmly welcoming. Politically, they are predictably Republican at the presidential level, but their conservatism is not doctrinaire. Each periodically elects moderate and even liberal Democrats to federal office. George McGovern and Tom Daschle were South Dakotans; both of North Dakota's U.S. Senators are currently mainstream Democrats.In truth, of course, most Americans know almost nothing about North and South Dakota. They are not at all identical, but their names sound alike, and so peopl...
More About: Idea , Carolina , Wrong

Another One Bites the Dust
2008-01-16 13:33:00
Another election night, another frontrunner on the floor. This time it was John McCain's turn, following up his big win in New Hampshire with a defeat at the hands of Mitt Romney, who is—and someone ought to acknowledge this—the only candidate to finish either first or second in every Republican primary and caucus held to date. That record will likely end this Saturday in South Carolina, but Romney's success could still propel him to a strong finish in Nevada, which holds its caucus on the same day (and which is, despite its libertine reputation, a state with a substantial Mormon population).The McCain camp is, as expected, pulling out all the rhetorical stops, particularly emphasizing Romney's status as a native son, born in Detroit, whose father served three terms as Michigan's governor. The last of these terms, however, expired some forty years ago, and nobody under the age of 62 has ever encountered a ballot with George Romney's name on it. Further, nothing forced M...

Playing With Matches
2008-01-15 14:41:00
Finally, we're going to hear from a real state. I mean no offense to my friends in Iowa and New Hampshire, but if you went out of your way to find the two most unrepresentative states in our union, you might well end up with these two. Disproportionately rural and overwhelmingly white, Iowa and New Hampshire lack both ethnic and economic diversity. The largest city in either state, Des Moines, boasts a population that ranks below such obscure suburbs as San Bernardino, California, Yonkers, New York, and North Las Vegas Nevada.Michigan, on the other hand, looks like America. It has rural and farming interests in the north and west, large college towns (Ann Arbor) and small metropolises (Grand Rapids and Flint), and significant mining and tourist industries in the Upper Peninsula. And of course, there's also that huge urban center on the Canadian border known as Detroit, an economically devastated city with a significant African American population. You want to talk about diversity:...
More About: Matches

Fairy Tales and Reality
2008-01-14 14:15:00
Well, the Winter of Love didn't last very long. Was it only a week ago that everybody on television was busy pronouncing the end to racial discrimination in the United States? The results of the Iowa caucuses turned some rather formidable brains into a mush of Hallmark Channel tearjerkers and ABC After School Specials. This was not simply one man's triumph against the political odds, we were told, but rather one of those transcendent American moments that tell us who we are and how far we have come: Neil Armstrong, meet Barack Obama. One reporter, in the full throes of premature exultation, pointed out that Obama "won in an overwhelmingly white state, suggesting that the country might be moving to a new era in which race no longer defines identity as it has throughout U.S. history".What a difference a loss makes!The first murmurs began almost immediately after Hillary Clinton took to the podium in New Hampshire, claiming her upset victory in the nation's first presidential primar...
More About: Reality , Tales , Fairy Tales

War! (Good God, Y'all)
2008-01-13 15:38:00
For those of you who wish to crow about America's impending victory in Iraq, the New York Times has a feature story in today's edition that you might want to avoid. Actually, if you have somehow managed to define victory down to the current bloody (but less bloody!) situation, then you probably don't read the Times anyway, preferring to get your news on Fox from former journalist Brit Hume. It is, of course, a wonderful thing that fewer U.S. soldiers and Marines are dying in Mesopotamia, but if a zero death count were the only goal of the mission, it seems like an immediate pullout would have done the trick far more effectively. Had we been told at the outset that the Iraq War would last into 2008, with troops still dying, bombs still exploding, and political stalemate in Baghdad seemingly unbreakable, the entire country would have taken to the streets. Instead, here we are nearly five years later listening to people like John McCain incessantly talk up the success of The Surge, ...
More About: Good

Separated at Birth
2008-01-12 14:56:00
I was awake much too early Friday morning watching the ABC news show that fills the hours between what used to be sign-off and what used to be the farm report. So let's call it about 3:30 a.m., though I could be off by an hour or so. Anyway, the program—I think they call it "Insomniac World News"—featured a segment on the latest Republican debate, held in either the state that permits legal prostitution or the one that flies the Confederate flag on the capitol grounds. I forget which is which.I've allowed myself a brief hiatus from debate-watching, particularly on the Republican side. It's not that I don’t sometimes enjoy watching grown men debase themselves, it's just that it has all become so familiar. First McCain tells us that he won't rest until every acre of real estate between Damascus and Karachi is occupied by the U.S. Army. Then Rudy ups the ante by suggesting that we waterboard every tenth person going through airport security, just in case. About that time, Fr...
More About: Birth , Separated

Common Sense and Paranoia on Campus
2008-01-11 13:37:00
From Inside Higher Ed comes the bizarre story of a young man who was expelled from Valdosta State University in Georgia for opposing the construction of two parking garages on campus. He was evidently quite the nuisance, sending out mass e-mailings, posting flyers, and penning letters to the school paper. I don't pretend to understand all the motivations behind college activism, but I can think of an injustice or two more pressing than a university's desire to spend student fees erecting a parking structure. Nevertheless, this was the cause that apparently galvanized one T. Hayden Barnes into action, and I suppose not every protest has to be about peace and freedom.This is, of course, the sort of thing that happens on every campus every now and then, but rarely matters even if it reaches the stage of a student government resolution or a faculty senate hissy fit. But Valdosta State officials didn't wait for Mr. Barnes to generate meaningful support for his initiative. Instead...
More About: Sense , Campus , Common , Common Sense , Paranoia

Your Frontrunner Du Jour
2008-01-10 14:37:00
When people talk about character, I often think of an underrated movie that hit the big screen fifteen years ago. "Hero" starred Dustin Hoffman, Geena Davis, and Andy Garcia, and it was, in many ways, the sort of manipulative, overly dramatic multi-star vehicle that I usually hate. Truth be told, I hate most movies. But there was something about this particular film that grabbed me.If you haven't seen it, I suppose I should include a spoiler alert here, though I doubt it's necessary. Anyhow, consider yourself warned: if you read further, I'm going to give away the plot. Hoffman's character, a middle-aged, self-centered ne'er-do-well, finds himself at the scene of an airplane crash and, at at no small personal risk, forces open one of the doors and saves several lives, including that of TV reporter Davis. He then proceeds on his bitter way, only to learn that a homeless guy (Garcia) has taken credit for the feat. Cleaned up, our faux hero not only possesses the youthful, leading...

Big Girls Don't Cry
2008-01-09 13:39:00
So, anyone see that one coming? Certainly not the Clintons, who were telling everyone who would listen that a loss by less than ten points would be a victory. Certainly not Barack Obama, whose evident self-confidence may have ultimately put off many New Hampshirites who defiantly insisted that their votes had yet to be counted. And certainly not the working press, which spent the past five days gleefully dancing on Hillary's grave.Oh, and not me, either.Many of the lessons coming out of New Hampshire this morning are those that we seemingly have to re-learn every four years. First, Iowa is different. Their night-long caucuses, especially on the Democratic side, discourage participation by people whose commitment to politics is anything less than fervent. That is, caucus results, even when turnout is relatively high, provide a distorted picture of the electorate. Mike Huckabee found that out last night; so did Barack Obama.It was not the youth vote that came out to support Obama las...
More About: Girls