Clinton, Obama now standing even

What happened

The Democratic presidential race was left wide open this week after Hillary Clinton upset Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary, breaking the momentum that Obama had built by winning the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3. Polls leading up to election night showed Obama with a lead of up to 10 points, but Clinton eked out a victory with 39 percent of the vote to Obama’s 36 percent, with John Edwards a distant third. “Over the last week, I listened to you,” Clinton told her gleeful supporters, “and in the process I found my own voice.” Exit polls found that women voted overwhelmingly for Clinton while the young people who helped Obama win Iowa failed to turn out in New Hampshire.

Clinton’s advisors said the tide turned in her favor after a voter asked her in a Portsmouth diner how she managed to keep going through a long, difficult campaign. Clinton, her voice growing hoarse with emotion, made it clear she was in pain over predictions that her campaign was on the brink of disaster. “I just don’t want to see [the country] fall backwards,” she said, her eyes brimming. “This is very personal for me.” That moment, captured by TV cameras, shattered the stereotype of Clinton as an emotionless automaton, said Ann Lewis, a senior aide. “People saw, ‘She’s human, she cares, she is like me.’”

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What the editorials said

“This is good news, and not just for the senator from New York,” said The Washington Post. For months the country was expecting a coronation for Hillary Clinton. After Iowa, it was writing her obituary. Now it’s clear that the race won’t be decided until many other states, and voters, get to weigh in. And now we’ll truly have the time to examine the relative merits of “her experience and his inspiration.”

Let’s hope that topic is debated civilly, instead of through mean-spirited, personal attacks, said The New York Times. In New Hampshire, the Clinton team dragged out “the old playbooks of division and anger,” responding to Obama’s soaring rhetoric by belittling him. When Obama invoked Martin Luther King Jr., Clinton dismissed the civil-rights leader’s accomplishments, saying that “it took a president”—the white Lyndon Johnson—to pass the Civil Rights Act. Her husband, Bill, went off the deep end with a “bizarre and rambling attack” in which he called Obama’s campaign “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” That kind of divisiveness is ugly, and serves no one.

What the columnists said

What won it for Hillary, said Emily Bazelon in Slate.com, was “the Diner Sob.” She becomes a sympathetic figure only when she’s wounded and vulnerable. Watching another woman “struggle with her sudden second-tier status” always inspires sisterhood. The sexist response of the media, which portrayed Hillary as either faking her emotion or as a weak, whimpering female, only sealed the deal.

Obama, though, still has a more powerful message, said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. He’s not running as a single candidate but as the spearhead of “a movement,” fueled by idealism and weariness with bitter partisanship. He comes off as a smart, impressive, and serious man, who “does not make cynical use of his race,” and it will be difficult for my fellow Republicans to attack him. “In terms of raw talent and personal appeal, Obama beats Clinton hands down.”

There was only “one clear loser in New Hampshire,” said Dick Meyer in CBSnews.com: “conventional wisdom.” The results should be a warning to take polls and pundits with a large grain of salt from now on. Is Clinton the front-runner again? Can Obama bounce back? “In Campaign ’08, it’s wiser to ask questions than predict outcomes.”

What next?

Obama hopes to regain his momentum on Jan. 19 in Nevada and on Jan. 26 in South Carolina, where half of the usual Democratic primary voters are black. On Feb. 5—“Tsunami Tuesday”—22 states go to the polls, but Clinton advisors now say the race could be so tight that it may not be decided until Ohio, on March 4, or Pennsylvania, on April 22. Obama told supporters he was “still fired up,” but that they should prepare for a long campaign. “Voters are not going to let any candidate take anything for granted,” he said. “They want to lift the hood, kick the tires.”