New Hampshire: Hillary’s turning point?

“At first, the moment seemed like a disaster,” said Patrick Healy in The New York Times. One day before the New Hampshire primary, Hillary Clinton choked up when a woman in a diner asked her how she handled the relentless pressure of a presidential campaign. “It’s not easy,” replied Clinton, appearing to fight back tears. “This is very personal for me.” To her handlers, already depressed by Barack Obama’s 10-point—and widening—lead in the most recent polls, Clinton’s “wet-eye moment” seemed sure to “undercut her message of strength and experience,” and they braced themselves for a double-digit loss. Instead, undecided voters, working-class Democrats, and women all rallied to Hillary’s side on primary day and handed her one of the biggest upsets in recent political history, saving her candidacy in the process. So why were the polls so wrong? asked Clarence Page in the Chicago Tribune. Simple: When she thought she’d lost the race, Hillary finally shed her “regal robo-candidate image” and came across as an actual human being. “For her, it came not a moment too soon.”

It wasn’t just that weepy moment that rallied women behind Clinton, said Joe Conason in Salon.com. Her defeat a week earlier in the Iowa caucuses touched off a “crescendo of full-throated glee” from the national press corps, which cannot conceal how much it dislikes her. New Hampshire’s famously independent voters don’t like being told whom they’re going to vote for, and may in the end have simply grown “sick of the corrosive hostility” heaped on Clinton by male pundits, reporters, and even the other Democratic candidates. Female voters in particular were evidently “tired of seeing Clinton attacked,” said Madeleine Kunin in The Washington Post, “and not ready to let go of the possibility that a woman might be elected president.” In Iowa, Obama beat Clinton among women, but in New Hampshire, she won the women’s vote by a landslide of 46 percent to 29 percent.

Clearly, gender was a factor—but was race? asked Eugene Robinson, also in the Post. There’s a long history in this country of white voters telling pollsters they’ll vote for a black candidate, but then, somehow, voting for the other guy in the privacy of the polling booth. In this case, the fact that the other “guy” was a woman complicates matters further. With a potential first black president running against a potential first female president, past campaigns are “an unreliable guide.”

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It may not be that complicated, said Charles Krauthammer in National Review Online. With the added scrutiny that fell on Obama after his win in the Iowa caucuses, a lot of voters may simply have come to realize that behind his “soaring rhetoric and personal biography,” Obama’s qualifications for the presidency are suspect, at best. When you actually study his policies and voting record, he looks like a rather ordinary liberal Democrat of the sort that routinely loses presidential elections, rather than some kind of national savior. In the last days of the New Hampshire campaign, said Jonathan V. Last in The Weekly Standard, Clinton started emphasizing Obama’s lack of experience, and his track record of dodging controversial votes and changing positions. She pointed out, for example, that he vowed to vote against the Patriot Act, but then, as a first-term U.S. senator, voted for it out of political expediency. His talk of change, she said, was “a false hope.” That message was “effective in motivating voters,” and you can be sure she’ll stick with it.

Hillary “may have clawed her way out of an abyss” in New Hampshire, said Meghan Daum in the Los Angeles Times, but a single moment of warmth and humanity won’t erase her biggest problem. “Clinton’s aching need for the presidency is freaking voters out.” She got choked up in New Hampshire because she thought it was all slipping away. In women, ambition of that desperate sort is considered, well, unattractive, and ultimately, most Democrats remain very ambivalent about her. In the primaries to come, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal, Clinton won’t win by crying. She’ll have to turn up the attacks on Obama’s experience, undermine his promise of “change,” and ridicule his message of hope. In short, “she is going to try to destroy Mr. Obama.” Democrats will resent her for ruining their dream of a new Camelot. “But she will pay that price to win, and try to clean up the mess later.”