NYT
MANCHESTER, N.H.
Whatever your politics, people, you have to admit this is one great presidential race. What next? Fred Thompson takes Florida on a sympathy vote from retirees? (They like a leader who’s really, really rested.) John Edwards finds a new emotion for South Carolina? (Anger is so cold weather.) I don’t think anyone can top Mike Gravel’s speech to the New Hampshire high school students when he told them to avoid alcohol and stick with marijuana. But really, we’re ready for anything.
If you’re a fan of democracy, Hillary Clinton’s primary victory this week has to be a good thing. You don’t want the whole election decided on the basis of a strange ritual in Iowa that resembles Red Rover with votes, along with the considered opinion of a small state full of idiosyncratic New Englanders. We want a turn! South Dakota wants a turn!
The Democratic contest is extremely unusual for an American election in that it contains more than one viable option. Barack Obama turns out to have a positive genius for making moderation sound exciting and is perhaps the only politician in American history who can get a crowd all worked up with a call to politeness. “We can disagree without being disagreeable,” he said in his New Hampshire farewell, drawing a roar of approval.
In a country where the spoils go to the loudest shrieker, this is absolutely revolutionary and very important. Most Americans want a moderate government, but nobody has ever before been able to make moderate seem interesting, let alone sexy. (Remember Joseph Lieberman.)
On the other side, there’s the new Hillary Clinton, who bears a distinct resemblance to the old Hillary Clinton. “Over the last week I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice,” she told her victory party Tuesday night. She then went on to give an extremely boring speech that began: “This campaign is about people.”
Clinton actually seems most genuine when she’s being dull. She’s gone back to talking about policy with voters. That’s just the way she saved her first Senate campaign by disappearing into the depths of upstate New York for an endless listening tour that drove reporters mad with tedium but seemed to make the citizens very happy.
“Finding common ground and working to make change has been the cause of my life,” she told a crowd in Hampton, N.H., lifting Obama’s theme. She is a shameless borrower of other candidates’ good stuff. She’s even cribbed Barack’s signature “fired up” line on occasion, and it’s probably only a matter of time before she announces the sudden discovery of long-lost Kenyan relatives.
But when she started answering questions, she got very Hillary — talking about carbon neutrality and H.M.O. payments and procurement reform, ticking off her five-point plans and three-part explanations. The large crowd, which had been standing in a high school gym for nearly two hours before she arrived, seemed to enjoy it. Her bond with the people isn’t a passionate one, but when it works, it’s a genuine connection that starts with the belief that she will work really, really hard on their behalf.
Everybody is going to have a story about why the gender gap erupted in New Hampshire, why female voters rallied to Hillary’s side after the horrendous week when she lost Iowa, was cornered in the weekend debate, told that she was unlikable on national television, and then teared up when a sympathetic voter asked her how she held up under it all. Do women Obama’s age look at him and see the popular boy who never talked to them in high school? Did they relate to Clinton’s strategy of constantly reminding her audiences that she’s been working for reform for 35 years? Barack’s not going to be able to top that unless he can prove he was an agent of change in elementary school.
My own favorite theory is that this week, Hillary was a stand-in for every woman who’s overdosed on multitasking. They grabbed at the opportunity to have kids/go back to school/start a business/become a lawyer. But there are days when they can’t meet everybody’s needs and the men in their lives — loved ones and otherwise — make them feel like failures or towers of self-involvement. Clinton’s failed attempt to suck it up hit home.
The women whose heart went out to Hillary knew that it wasn’t rational. She asked for this race, and if she was exhausted, the other candidates were, too. (John McCain is 71 and tired and nobody felt sorry for him.) The front-runner always gets ganged up on in debates. If her campaign was in shambles, it was her job to fix it or take the consequences. But for one moment, women knew just how Hillary felt, and they gave her a sympathy vote. It wasn’t a long-term commitment, just a brief strike by the sisters against their overscheduled world.
Or it could just have been a better get-out-the-vote operation.
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