Something Happening Here

Written en route from New Hampshire to Nevada

On Monday afternoon in Manchester, New Hampshire, I called my Executive Producer in New York and said that we needed to pencil in more time than we had allotted for Andrea Mitchell's report on the Clinton Campaign. It needed to be enlarged to include a 48 second soundbite of Hillary Clinton at a roundtable, answering a question about the campaign. She was tired, and she was emotional. She did what any of us would have, and have done at times: she briefly lost control of her emotions. At that very moment, while he was miles away and unaware of it, Barack Obama started to lose control of what we'd been told was a commanding lead in New Hampshire.

I am a son of New England — my father is from Framingham, Mass., my parents met in college in Maine, and over a lifetime of immersion I came to know the psyche well. The core of the older, native New Hampshire population (albeit in a State that is rapidly changing) is still made up of the sons and daughters of the original Puritans. They take civic responsibility seriously, they take care of those who need it and they take pride in "process". In modern political terms, they generally don't like negativity, they reward the downtrodden, they earnestly deliberate over their choice of candidate and they venerate the sturdy among us. In short, they are good people to have in your corner. Hillary Clinton was bloodied in New Hampshire. The people of New Hampshire saw it and didn't like it. They saw assumptions forming and didn't like them. Some felt they were being told what to think: the race was decided, Hillary was desperate and inauthentic. Worst of all — and this was made very clear to me by more than one person: when some in the media quietly doubted that Hillary Clinton's emotions at that roundtable were real (there was quiet snickering about an "acting job" born of an urgent need to seem normal) it was proof to them that cynicism had taken hold of the politics/media realm — and they simply refused to believe that.

Had Bill Clinton not famously coined the title "The Comeback Kid" for himself, his wife would have rightfully claimed it for herself in New Hampshire. That the same State rewarded these two imperfect politicians, in the same way, years apart, is remarkable.

Also remarkable was the apparent transformation of the candidate. The Senator who failed to gain the full support of women voters in Iowa was saved by them in New Hampshire. The woman who gave a victory speech after losing in Iowa — admitted in her New Hampshire victory speech that what she'd really lost...was her own voice.

There will be numerous deconstructions over the days to come. Theories about how African American candidates for office have confounded pollsters (see: Bradley, Wilder, Gant, Jackson) will receive a thorough airing, and deservedly so. We in the media will beat ourselves bloody (and deservedly so) for reaching conclusions before the voters have spoken. A further prediction? Give us a few weeks — we will promptly forget the lessons of this debacle in polling, predictions and primary politics. We will all live to screw up another day, though our performance in New Hampshire will be hard to beat.

It should be noted that virtually everyone got it wrong. The only point of agreement among all the competing campaigns in New Hampshire was that Barack Obama was headed for a double-digit victory, as they told anyone who'd listen. I have an email from a Clinton fundraiser who denounced Hillary as a lost cause and threw his support to Obama...while the polls were still open on Tuesday. A veteran Clinton loyalist spoke of the campaign in New Hampshire in the past tense on the morning of the election, saying the Senator from New York had run smack into "an ideal...a movement," called Barack Obama. There was no defeating an ideal, said this completely defeated politico. Not this year, not in New Hampshire.

In his beautiful, soaring concession speech, Obama mentioned the town of Lebanon for a reason, and listening to him, I knew why. I was with him in Lebanon the day before -- and what we saw there was something of a defining moment in the campaign — it surprised him, his staff members, the Secret Service on board the campaign bus...even the bus driver. We turned the corner toward the event and saw hundreds of people lined up through the streets of the town just to see him, to feel his aura and to later say that they'd done it — they'd been there. There were hundreds more than the venue could hold, and they stood there anyway, and kept coming. Obama, overwhelmed by the overflow crowd, insisted on an outdoor speech before his indoor speech. This much is important, and should be said: any journalist covering any candidate that day, in that town, would have come away as I did after seeing those people, saying something akin to the old song lyric, "something's happening here." A colleague of mine contends Obama got caught up in the history he was making. I don't think that's quite fair. The candidate didn't change his message as much as Iowa changed the way we heard it.

That day, I saw people embrace Barack Obama the way people embrace loved ones returning from foreign battlefields. I saw people with small children, brought along simply so their parents could years later tell them, to the point of predictable annoyance, "you were there...". Losing in New Hampshire may well make Barack Obama a better candidate. While it's the kind of thing that is always said at times like these by those of us whose names have never appeared on a ballot, I think it might just be true in this case.

On the eve of the primary, I attended the last big rally of the Clinton New Hampshire campaign. While large and boisterous enough to distract attention from the decidedly inelegant venue (the indoor tennis courts at the Executive Health and Fitness Center in the shadow of the Manchester airport control tower) it was packed and it was emotional. Our producer spotted tears in Chelsea's eyes. Campaign workers were trying to seem upbeat. A British journalist called the press credential hanging around his neck "a ticket to the last supper." Senator Clinton gave her stump speech, only infused with more emotion: shades of anger, melancholy, frustration and wistfulness. She made a forceful and direct appeal for support, at one point aimed specifically at the women in the audience. Her husband nodded and clapped supportively behind her and shook every hand in the rope line afterwards. I stood several feet away, watching the familiar ballet of incoming hands and thinking of the two years I spent covering his Presidency, and how much has changed since then. He's still in the family retail business, where the basic transaction remains the same.

New Hampshire voters, masters of retail politics and educated consumers all, saw what their Iowa counterparts had done days earlier, and chose not to follow the same path. They instead gave their approval to a former POW, and a former First Lady. Poles apart in many ways, now joined together in the history of this strange process.

As politicians, John McCain and Hillary Clinton have a lot of mutual respect for each other. They have traveled to Iraq together during a dangerous time in the conflict, and they lived to tell about it. Now they can say the same thing about New Hampshire.

Comments

[Democrab]

Ayah, you could have left out the "imperfect politician" snotty remark and it might have given this article a little credibility.

Because now it has none.

[slg]

Thank you for this analysis. Voices speaking reasonably and from the heart are the ones most useful for these times.

These first primaries are a refreshing distraction from the daily BushCo fiasco. It's great imagining those days over, even for a moment but let's not kid ourselves, they're not.

The major repercussions of White House shenanigans have yet to be felt. Whoever gets the top job will be overwhelmed by the scope of it. They will need the full support of the entire country to make things right. That is, if the intention is to make things right.

[Bulbul]

Brian, People like Yourself and Gibson, makes it watchable. I am glad both of you and others leave your opinion at home and give us what we need to know and let us decide !

[brabc1]

Clinton/Obama in '08!

Now that's a winning ticket!

[invisible]

I never believed the double-digit lead madness. That would mean Iowa gave a nearly 20 point bounce. C'MON! And now here we go again. This "comeback" is an illusiion as well. The polls were wrong. She was NEVER down and (sans media) this race is right back to being what it already is: a dead heat.

[JacktheBlogger]

I haven't seen that much omelet on the face of the media since that infamous call for Gore in Florida. Fox News, which showed its bias back then in 2000 by not calling Florida for Gore, did so again - by not calling New Hampshire for Hillary until Obama began his concession speech!

The moral of the lesson is that the people are eventually more powerful than the media. The media was trying to anoint Obama the Messiah, while simultaneously dissing Hillary as a pariah! But the descendants of Puritans said "Wait a minute, not so fast, there is a woman in this race who has finally found her voice and we like what she has to say."

So the battle is joined and more states will get to have their say in what promises to be a very interesting race for the nomination on both sides of the blue-red divide.

[ssg13565]

Now, if you could only lose Tim Russert, I could watch your coverage of politics again.

Somehow, my fingers always press the channel changing button on my remote control whenever Tim Russert appears.

[Imhotep]

How did 5% of Obama's vote mysteriously end up in Clinton's column? Peace

[Possum]

Mr. Williams - - Re: Lebanon, and people standing by the side of the road and overflow crowds.
You in the pundit class do a huge disservice when you state that any candidate is obviously on the way to victory because they have folks waiting by the side of the road just to watch them drive through, or have overflow crowds. I've done volunteer work for presidential campaigns for thirty years, and EVERY cycle has at least one candidate who has people who wait by the side of the road, hoping to catch a glimpse of the person they believe will be the next President. EVERY candidate with a smart advance team has at least one overflow crowd. And EVERY candidate, even those who end up with less than .01% of the vote, has people who weep with joy just because they got to see their candidate in person - - and has parents who ask their candidate to touch their child, just so they could tell the little tyke later that they were touched by greatness.
You claim in your post that no reporter could see this phenomenon and not notice it, not realize it meant something important and authentic was happening. Well, all these things happened to Al Gore in 2000 - - back then there were also hundreds of people lined the road to see him, and folks held their children up to be touched by him, and record, overflow crowds followed him from state to state. And the press did manage to not see an awe inspiring moment in history. Like everything else associated with Gore in 2000, the majority of the press actively sneered at the phenomenon and the minority of the press totally ignored it.
I mean no disrespect toward Mr. Obama or his supporters, but you need to learn from your own mistakes for more than five minutes. You no longer report the news, you write novels. The real story in New Hampshire is that the polls were way off and that you pundits proved once again there's no performance standards required to hold your jobs.

[Beatitudes]

"imperfect politicians" Wow. How poetic. Do you know any politician, any human, who is perfect?
What are you implying here? Politicians, we, by our very nature are imperfect. That's why we strive, get up in the morning, experience joy and too much tragedy, much of it out own making. For those politicians who persist in using the name of God, read this:
From The Beatitudes:

You enter under a black wrought-iron rainbow that spells St. Roch’s Cemetery and then under that an announcement in smaller black words: Campo Santo; it is a place of the dead. The tall gates are open, inviting you in and you look straight ahead and up the well-trod road and there is Jesus, his arms thrust upward to each side of the cross, six inch nails are hammered into his hands, you hear the pounding, pounding. His head is at an angle, looking to the ground as though in profound and everlasting disappointment with those he sought to save; he is crying soundlessly; his face is all compassion for a little girl saved more than a century ago from the yellow jack, her statue resting in his line of sight; you think his eyes are closed, don’t you? By his grace he sees. His legs are so muscular, feet lapping one over the over, leathered soles that have walked bare over a thousand miles of stony roads just to end up here. You wait, for you know that you will hear him scream why have you forsaken me. The image is protean, it brings one to ecstasy, it has been made into false amulets, it is evidence of our failings.

Lyn LeJeune- The Beatitudes Network-Rebuilding the Public Libraries of New Orleans, The New Orleans Chronicles, The Beatitudes, Book I in The New Orleans Trilogy and "The Last Time I Saw Ignatius J. Reilly" at www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com

[Tortillas]

Everyone wants to say they called the whole race after a couple of tiny Primaries. Pundits can be so tiresome. Lighten up buttercup!

Re-direct your frustrations with politics by engaging Americas true grass-roots candidates. While the media tries to figure out why their speculation and guess-work doesn't yield results, Arizona is quietly making a bold political statement.

Which candidate cut a hole in the America flag while illegal aliens cross our border in the background?

Which candidate wears an eye-patch like a pirate?

And, did you know there are two women in Arizona's Primary ballot?

http://projectwhitehouse.wordpress.com/

Arizona has produced a slew of candidates for the highest office in the nation. That's right, more candidates to choose from. While the country and its political pundits are focused on tiny East Coast states, some ten Republicans and fifteen new Democratic candidates will appear in the Arizona Primary ballot this February. An effort sponsored by The Tucson Weekly, an Arizona alternative newspaper, has opened the gates for a stable of dark-horse candidates.

As with all politics the sparks are already flying. Candidate Sean "CF" Murphy responds to a political ad filed by Democratic candidate Doctress Neutopia in which she desecrates the American flag by cutting a hole in it. Follow the antics of America's grass-roots candidates by tuning in to the campaigns blog.

http://projectwhitehouse.wordpress.com/

[elkabong]

"New Hampshire population­...earnest­ly deliberate over their choice of candidate and they venerate the sturdy among us."

While that may be true of New Hampshire Democrats, if this video clip (below) is an accurate representation of New Hampshire Republicans, they make their decision based on who looks good on TV.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/01/07/fox-gop-nh-debate-focus-group-findings/

P.S. Is John Edwards getting so little coverage in the corporate media because he dares to (vociferously) challenge the corporate status quo?

[PatA]

NoContest said "BACK off the celebrity sthick, SNL, Correspondents dancing goons, talk show glamour. The real news people of days past would never pull these stunts and than as to be taken seriously.­"
Sorry the world was passing you by and you didn't have the opportunity to look up from reading your "primer of the past".
Toodles, from The Great State of Texas, where we still joke around about politics. (Ever hear anything from Ann Richards and Molly Ivins?)
P.S. Howard Smith waved and grinned at me in Dulles airport one time. For shame!!! He looked downright jolly!

[Steamboater]

"That the same State rewarded these two imperfect politicians ..."
No politican is perfect?
" ... John McCain and Hillary Clinton have a lot of mutual respect for each other. They have traveled to Iraq together during a dangerous time in the conflict, and they lived to tell about it."
The difference of course is that McCain went to Iraq and roamed the streets of Baghdad with helicopters overhead and guarded by our military, returned to the U,S, and told everyone how safe it was while Hillary went to Iraq without blinders on.

[PatA]

Well, Brian Williams, I loved you on SNL for the self deprecating humour and guess what? I love you today for saying that you had it wrong!!! You're a good and standup sort of guy!
(from Texas, home of "The Book 'Em Horns"..wh­ere the pundits have had to eaten some mighty big words about MB and his empire)