Comments on A Theory on Obama's Loss

There's also the fact that Hillary did much better in precincts that used Diebold voting machines.

http://drunkardslamppost.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/diebold-and-new-hampshire/

Maybe voters are willing to embrace Hillary Clinton in the privacy of the voting booth, but not in front of their family and friends. Maybe they felt social pressure not to vote for "the bitch."

How boput "a theory on Hilary's WIN"?

I think that her "tearing up" touched a nerve among women voters. She was expressing frustration at coming in second to a man with less experience than her, in the context of a race where she's criticized for being both too tough and too weak. A lot of women can relate to those emotions, and that empathy translate to support in the voting booth.

I don't think it was intentional. When she makes an effort to be more human, it usually comes off as clumsy - remember the cackle and the christmas ads.

thanks, ziggity @1. we need to put a moratorium on electronic voting until that technology is proven more trustworthy. i've thought this for years. there's just too much at stake. the article points out that correlation is more likely than causation in the nh discrepancy, but still comes to my conclusion.

Actually I also posited #2's point last night. Everyone seems determined to find Hillary unlikeable and unpopular.

Come on. It's like a student government election pitting the star athlete/homecoming king against the nerdy validictorian. People don't like her. I find myself (an ardent Hillary supporter) having to pre-emptively defend why I'm voting for her among friends, because I'm sure I'm going to get crap for it.

So I can well imagine in a caucus, that people who might have wanted to vote for Hillary (especially maybe women 18-24) who felt that they couldn't. Who didn't want to get made fun of. Or have to defend themselves. So they went with their boyfriends to caucus for Obama. That would explain why Hillary did so much better among young women in NH than in Iowa.

Also, neither Obama nor Edwards helped their cause by their personal attacks on Hillary. Obama's "you're likeable enough," was BAD. Edwards sexist comments on Hillary tearing up that led to a prominent Edwards supporter saying she kind of wanted to vote for Hillary? That was even WORSE.

None of this is to discount racism, which I'm sure also played a part. I think the answer is really that there were five things going on here that coalesced to produce a Clinton win.

It's interesting to see now that Clinton and Obama are the frontrunners that every vote for one is being interpreted as a vote against the identity of the other, i.e. a vote for Hillary must necessarily reflect unwillingness to vote for a black candidate and a vote for Obama must similarly reflect a deeply-rooted cultural sexism.

YFTM that northern New England is very predominantly, if not damn near thoroughly, white (or at least, non-black, non-latino, non-asian). That being said, it's also surprisingly Democratic and not in general what one would call racist (okay, pockets of PWT near the MA border notwithstanding).

It's encouraging, not discouraging, that Obama nabbed over a third of the NH Dem vote. HRC's win is still surprising; I'd have thought that Edwards's homey, heartfelt, populist style would have done a lot better there. (My dad and stepmom make a cameo in an Edwards campaign video.)

@7, yeah, exactly. This "support for Clinton comes from racists", "support for Obama comes from sexists" talk doesn't make sense to me. You'd think all these sexist and racist democrats would vote for Edwards.

I think it is just as hard to figure out why a vote went one way or another as it is to figure out how a future vote is going to turn out. It's all guessing. That aside, I think that Clinton gained votes from people like me who are undecided but love an "underdog."

It may be "unprecedented" that so many POLLS have been off, but it's certainly not the first time that media election predictions have been surprisingly off. 2000? I'm surprised that the media hasn't come to expect this.

There was also a lot of turn out for voters over 40, which predominately support Hillary over Obama...man or woman. These voters are more reliable in the general election then the youth vote, and I think NH proved this.

I think the ganging up media/other candidates made the young women voters get PISSED. As a young woman voter I have been sickened by how she was treated during Iowa and the 5 days afterward. Blatent sexism, blatent media bias. Even if I wasn't a Hillary supporter, I would be pissed off.

I deal with sexism every goddamn day. I have the same frustration that she voiced during her more human moments on this campaign. I think the Op-Ed article in the NYT times that said if a woman had the same credentials as Obama there is no way in FUCK she could run for president. People would laugh her off the stage.

So yeah, I think that young women were like "oh fuck, wait a minute. She is getting fucked for no reason other than she is a woman and strong (therefore unlikeable and a bitch)". And they voted accordingly.

Lame headline. Did Obama really "lose"?

To answer your quesion, compare the polls to the election results in Nevada, and the polls to the election results in South Carolina. NV has a public caucus, SC is a primary. If we see the same poll/result disparity in SC but not in NV, it suggests your theory might be right.

@13 - I don't think obama "lost" at all. this about how far we've come, from the inevitability of clinton winning to her losing Iowa and winning NH by less than 10,000 votes. Obama hit her with a hard 1-2, and even though it didn't knock her out, he's made it a real contest and not a coronation.

someone said on NPR last night that this isn't all that bad for obama, because if he knocked hillary out right away it would make the regular campaign that much longer.

obama is in GREAT position.

@12 Ummm Reality Check Monique.

Hillary has LESS credentials than Obama. Being the not so humble wife of a president is not credentials.

People did vote and laugh her off the Iowa stage.

Weren't you paying attention?

It's not that she's a woman.

It's that she's Hillary.

Excuse me... that should have been @12.

The problem with the theory that voters went with the white candidate despite what they might've said about supporting Obama in the advance polls is that Obama's final numbers were right around the predicted numbers. Clinton just surged in the day before the primary. I think Obama's supporters basically held firm.

I think the Op-Ed article in the NYT times that said if a woman had the same credentials as Obama there is no way in FUCK she could run for president. People would laugh her off the stage.

Case in point would be Carol Moseley Braun.

This stuff about Hillary making a "comeback" is total BS. Either 1) a bunch of people made up their minds at the last minute to vote for Hillary, or 2) the pre-election polls got it wrong. The exit poll that CNN did very clearly shows that #1 is not the case (Recently decided voters didn't have any special affinity for Hillary), so thus the polls were wrong. Why are we even debating this?

@12 - right on Original Monique.

Something about this whole "people won't vote for a black man in private, but they will in public" doesn't ring true for me, especially since the Obama volunteer who sent the letter to Slog yesterday came to the opposite conclusion about people "looking for permission to vote for Obama." He thought that, behind closed doors, people would be more likely to vote for Obama. That it was his lack of experience and focus on "hope" that resulted in people wanting to vote for him but looking for an excuse. And that if people didn't need to justify their choice, they would vote based on their emotions, which are telling them to vote for the inspirational candidate.

What EXPERIENCE does Hilary have? All of these claims of "30+ years of experience" are fabrications.

If I'm married to a doctor for 30 years, I can't go open up a hospital and put on the sign: "Over 30 years of experience in medicine!"

No, she's got eight years of experience. Before that, she held NO PUBLIC OFFICE. She was AROUND politics for 30 years, yes. But that's because of her husband. She wasn't a leader. She wasn't an elected official.

My father has been a fire chief for over 30 years. I know a lot about firefighting because of him. I've even been out on fires with him. Does that make me more experienced than someone who's only been a firefighter for a few years, someone whose family was never involved in firefighting? Does that mean I should run for State Fire Commissioner on the platform that I've got "Over 30 years of experience in fire prevention!!!" Uh, no.

Obama's got four years in the Senate and and before that, he was in public office in Illinois. And he didn't get either of those positions because of name recognition, who he was married to, or his connections. He did it. From the ground up. Because of who he is and what he believes in.

And it's a show of his character that he HASN'T slammed HRC on her claims that he is "less experienced" and "doesn't have a track record."

The other day, HRC said Obama's "free ride is over." Fuck that, it's time for HER free ride to be over.

I think it would be awesome to have a female president. I also think it would be awesome to have a black president. (Shit, it would be awesome to just have a president that wasn't an old white man.) More than all of that, however, it would be awesome to have an AWESOME president.

OBAMA WOULD BE AN AWESOME PRESIDENT.

Far more so than HRC. HRC is a hack, she's in too deep. She's old school, she's the status quo. Will she shake things up, get rid of the good ol' boys club? Hells no. She's a lifetime member, and so is her husband.

She's running on the "I've got a vagina and my husband was the president" platform, and that's fucked up. And anti-feminist. I believe that a woman can and should be president, and that there are many women who would make excellent candidates. But to vote for her SIMPLY BECAUSE YOU WANT A FEMALE PRESIDENT IS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE.

It's not a feminist act, in fact it is ANTI-FEMINIST. Along with the vote comes the implication that she's the best we could get... And that's simply not true.

Voting with your vagina is ignorant and hurtful.

And Eli's right on about his caucus versus balloting theory. I love Eli.

*sigh*

I don't need any social permission to vote for Obama. I just need a much, much clearer idea on where he stands on issues. I'm not one of those people who vote on inspiring speeches, charisma, or rhetoric like "hope" or "reject fear." I want a president who is going to get GET... SHIT... DONE. And has a track record that indicates they absolutely can.

Eli, to NOT acknowledge race in this, um, race would be crazy IMHO, so I'm glad you stuck your toe in on that point.

Perhaps in some fantastic place here in the USA, there is a perfect world where a person's race doesn't have a minor to major impact on peoples' perceptions of candidates, and their electability.

That place is most certainly not known to me.

So while I would wish that people looked the candidates square in the eye and made their choices on issues only, the truth is that personality, gender and race -- and how each and every voter internalizes and externalizes those concepts -- will continue to be a dynamic in American elections.

(1) Stupid "why aren't you more popular?" questions in debate caused reflexive support for Hills.
(2) "Emotional moment" caused reflexive support for Hills. All the women I know who saw that video said they thought it was a sign of how much she cared about the election, not duplicity and/or weakness.
(3) RETARDED EDWARDS RIP ON "EMOTIONAL MOMENT" GALVANIZED HILLARY SUPPORT. My mom was an Edwards supporter. After that comment, she *instantly* switched to Clinton.
(4) More independents chose to vote in the Republican contest for McCain than the Dem vote models predicted.
(5) Old left Edwards supporters peeled off after IA showed Edwards unelectability.
(6) 15% of NH voters went into primary day undecided. Polls had big margins of error.

But it couldn't have been those things, could it Eli? Had to be racism.

Original Monique rocks, and Reality Check can suck the big hairy balls of the gods.

I'm getting a little sick of the people who deride Obama for only being charismatic and emphasizing style over substance.

Democrats constantly have a problem with condensing all their myriad pet issues into one overarching idea and message. Does anyone even remember what Kerry's slogan was? I certainly don't, because it was fucking pathetic. Democratic presidential nominees keep getting creamed in the general election, because the public doesn't give a fuck about the issues. They care about character (or the illusion of it), appearance, and charisma.

Even Clinton wouldn't have won in '92 if it hadn't had been for Ross Perot.

@22: Read this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_clinton

I don't claim she has experience because of her husband. I claim she has experience because of her education, connection to politics (not including Bill) and her time as a Lawyer. She was an active part of the civil rights movement and women's rights. She has always been active in supporting women both domestically and internationally.

She utilized her position as first lady, making contacts pushing through real agendas. She was concerned for women in Afganistand before it was trendy. She also has supported Planned Parenthood international and made it a priority to give women rights in all countries.

She fucked up on the war, but as I have said before....Senators were up for re-election the very next month, and more than 80% of people wanted to grant Bush the power to strike. And as we all know, in the 2002 senate/congress elections, the GOP gained more seats because of Fear and Dem's that voted against that bill. So yeah, they also fucked the Democratic party as much as the war has helped it.

I think Original Monique is closest to the truth in her post @12. But I don't really buy the argument @27 as much.

That said, remember that most Dems are very happy with the choices they have this year - and don't really have any complaints so long as one of them wins. It's a great year for Dems, and it's kind of sad watching the Repubs flounder around with such pitiful candidates they got from scraping the bottom of the barrel.

I mean, when Ron Paul is the best they have, that's pretty bad.

If the Republicans had a candidate with the charisma of Obama and the policies of Ron Paul (except foreign policy), it would be a landslide election for the Republicans.

If you don't realize it, you should know that Republicans and Libertarians/Independents love the positions of Ron Paul except his foreign policy stance.

The Dems should be happy that Ron Paul looks/acts quirky, and has terrible foreign policy ideas, else we would all be watching a surge of momentum and enthusiasm for him and not Obama.

Now that would be an interesting race to watch.... A (R) candidate that has Ron Paul's ideas, but also promotes some different foreign policy other than isolationism, in the body of a 40 year old up and coming Senator....

That candidate would slam dunk the election, and the Dems could fight over the scraps.

I get really tired when people claim that Hillary has no experience really and that she rode her husband's coat tails. Thanks, Original Monique for a well argued post.

@27: When the Civil Rights movement was going on, HRC was campaigning for anti-immigration candidate Barry Goldwater. I'd say that immigrant rights are a pretty freakin' integral part of the whole "Civil Rights" thang.

Plus, that was all in the early 1960's. When she was a FUCKING TEENAGER. Like, 13. I don't think that you can count that as "LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE" or put that shit on your resume... Oh, and the ACLU only gives her a 75% rating for her entire lifetime... That's not so hot.

(I heard that once, when he was 10, Obama gave a homeless person five dollars. Does than mean that he's got 36 years of unquestionable experience with advocating for the poor? Come the fuck on.)

And are you including in her "extensive experience" the time that she spent as a WalMart board member?...

If she's such an avid supporter of Planned Parenthood, why does Obama get higher ratings from http://www.nfprha.org/ than she does?...

And as far as her connections and education go, well, Obama doesn't have any debts to pay, isn't a member of the Good Ol' Boys Club, and has been true to his causes all the way-- I'd say that HRC's involvement with WalMart proves that she's willing to compromise her "ethics" in exchange for MONEY and POWER.

She was even only Hillary Rodham until Bill was running for office and she though that changing her name to Clinton would get him more votes... Way to stand up for what you believe, HRC.

Obama is a lawyer, too. Graduated from Harvard Law School. Worked as a CIVIL RIGHTS lawyer and as a community organizer. He was also a college lecturer-- on constitutional law. He knows his shit.

He has seven years as an elected official in Illinois under his belt and four years in the Senate. That makes a total of eleven years in public office, which is MORE than HRC.

What's more, Obama doesn't have a trail of questionable affiliations and commmitments. He doesn't have people that he has to pay off, favors he owes. And his track record shows that he does what he knows to be right, not what will get him the $$$.

Obama was against the war at a time when it was unpopular to be so, while HRC went along with it because she wanted to get reelected. That is not excusable. Not in the slightest.

And to say that it was "easy" for Obama to be against the war is ignorant-- he was also in public office at the time and didn't shill to the ignorant masses-- no, he stayed true to his beliefs at a time when it was unpopular, even if it could have cost him HIS elected position.

And as far as overall years of involvement/possible resume making, well, he was born in 1961 and she was born in 1947 so obviously she's got 14 years on him. That doesn't mean anything.

(In fact, if you want to break it down, Obama's been doing the whole liberal thing since the day he was born and HRC is only doing it now 'cause she thinks it'll get her elected... She started out as a young-freakin'-Republican and has worked her way over here... If you wanna talk track record, Obama has the track record.)

As far as voting with your vagina goes, I'm not the only one who things it's entirely unfeminist:

http://jezebel.com/342733/so-basically-women-voters-just-chose-the-crying-will-get-you-what-you-want-candidate-awesome

Snizap! Doesn't get much more feminist than the Jezebels. Take that, ECB!

Here's a novel idea: Maybe the fact that Iowa had a caucus and New Hampshire had a full public vote is a factor.

That's already been argued by the MSM, Gomez @32. While that may help Clinton somewhat (easier to smile at husband/boyfriend and say you didn't actually vote for Clinton), I don't think it's quite as much of an impact.

@31: you're wrong.

Hillary started the Children's Defense Fund. Way way back before most Slog readers were born.

She became a political partner of Bill and worked with him intensely to reform education in Arkansas, then in the White House. They got shit all the time becuas she was NOT a typical wifey wife like Lady Bird Johnson -- she was too involved.
She was intimately involved in all of the Bill's struggles in every campaign and against impeachment. Go read a Woman in Charge. She was the one who held him up and said "fuck 'em, we gotta attack Ken Star."

That's what all her critics said for decades. She was too involved.

Now, suddenly, they and you claim she wasn't involved at all.

What total bull crap.

She won election in NY state and re-election. That alone is more than Obama who is in the US Senate about 1 year before he started running for president.

First she gets shit for being too involved, now she wasn't involved at all. This kind of 180 degree flip flopping is a sure sign that her detractors have a deep emotional and nonlogical drive to deprecate her.

She's been active in politics and progressive causes for 35 years, she's been the top political adviser to fucking Bill Clinton, she was in the White House, and she's a two term US Senator.

Criticize her all you want for her actual record -- no one likes that war resolution vote, I'm sure -- but stop lying that she has no record and no experience.

@31 THAT IS AWESOME!

I think it about sums everything up.

Maybe Hillary should consider moving on from claiming she has the experience?

With her advisors it isn't likely...

I think @32 nails most of it. A caucus is a very different vibe than an election. It tends to be more effected by the activist portions of the electorate. Then there is the whole public part of it too. Very different psychology. In the voting booth, it's just you and your own thoughts. In that environment, anything can happen.

That being said, I'd like to put aside race and gender for a second and ask a different question: What if this whole experience argument really did have an effect on the results? What if in the private, quiet of the voting booth a lot of folks started thinking a little more seriously about that (especially people over 35)?

After the Bhutto assassination, that issue definitely flashed through my middle-aged mind. I had a pang of "Do we really want the new guy's team in office right now? Can we really afford to have someone making the new guy mistakes (because there will be new guy mistakes)? Or would we be better served to have a team of people in office who already made those mistakes and learned from them?

I don't expect HRC to govern exactly as BC did. But a vote for her probably is a vote for that team. In all likelihood, we'll see a lot of the same faces we saw in the 1990s. Those people won't need to ramp up to speed in the same way that some of Obama's people might have to. Those people have already been through the process of hiring aides, dealing with Congress, etc. They've already been whacked upside the head by the opposition, kept on going, and gotten stuff done.

It's true, they aren't idealists anymore, and HRC's message has reflected this. As much as a presidential candidate can, she's pretty much been saying "Things are really fucked up, and fixing them is going to be a real long term, trench warfare slog."

This is not a message anyone wants to hear. But it is the truth. Things are really fucked up right now, maybe more fucked up than they ever have been in the history of our country (except for maybe during the Depression and the Civil War). Certainly, they are way more fucked up than they were when BC entered office in 1992. In a lot of ways it feels like the winner of this election will end up with the booby prize and an almost untenable situation.

BC spent much of his first term learning on the job, overreaching in fits of hubris, and spinning his wheels. HRC did her share of helping out too (see e.g., Health Care). But eventually, their team figured out how to get some stuff done. It seems like HRC has carried some of these lessons with her into her Senatorial career.

Contrast this to GWB. Dubya might not have known shit. But his people did. They jammed that tax cut through in record time. Once that was done, the game was over. We weren't going to spend money on anything useful to the average person. It was the corporate welfare gravy train from then on. If they hadn't accomplished anything else in 8 years, that would have been enough. And don't say that their fuck-ups around 911 undermine this argument. How did fucking up around 911 not serve their agenda in every way? But I digress.

The difference between 1992 and 2008 is that it is unclear whether we can really spot Obama the 2 years Clinton got to figure things out, put a good team together, and figure out how to get things done. It's not impossible or unprecedented for a newcomer to do this. Abe Lincoln did it. But is Obama Abe Lincoln? Who knows? Nobody thought much of Abe Lincoln when he was elected. But it does give me pause.

Maybe I'm not the only one. Maybe the reality of the challenge facing the next president is starting to become more clear to the voters. And as it does, maybe the gut anxiety I'm speaking of is also starting to seep into the electorate as a whole.

I think the voters in NH take very seriously their role as the focus group for the entire country. Maybe they simply wanted to send the message that it was too soon to choose one person over the other. Maybe they wondered, can Obama do it? Does he have the necessary experience? Maybe they decided that our country needed a bit more information before answering that question definitively.

We can argue the particulars of who has more experience, but I seriously doubt that Obama will ever overcome the conventional wisdom that HRC has more experience. To a large extent, this is because that conventional wisdom is true.

Both Obama and HRC are very accomplished people. Either one of them is clearly better than any Republican candidate, simply based on their intentions. But at a very basic reptilian brain level, HRC just scans as more experienced. She had many years of experience as an attorney. She served as First Lady, and she's been a Senator now for a number of years (and aside from the war vote, she seems to get good marks).

To try and analogize being the First Lady to being the son of a Fire Chief is kind of a ridiculous argument. It's also incredibly sexist, because it implies that being the First Lady had no value and contributed nothing to HRC's experience.

It's like saying that being Vice President was irrelevant to an evaluation of Al Gore's qualifications for President. I think a credible argument can be made that at the level of gaining insight into what it takes to be a good President, being First Lady offers more valuable information than being the VP (particularly in the Clinton White House, where the First Lady was allowed to be more active in policy matters. Ultimately, it doesn't matter how she got that position. It's what she took away from it.

Who do you think knows more about the emotional side of being President? Al Gore? Or HRC? Who has been more inside of a President's head? Obama doesn't have this experience.

Reasonable people can differ as to whether they think that experience is important or might be helpful to someone entering office as president. But I think it would be wrong to try and say that there was no experience to be had in that.

So ultimately, the question I suspect a lot of people are asking is as follows: Do I go with the brand name? Or do I go with that exciting, new, up and coming thing

HRC is Microsoft, a company with a long storied history of paying dividends. Obama is Facebook, with a big buzz, a high market valuation, but not much of a track record of actually being profitable.

Typically, I'm more attracted to the Facebooks of the world. But this year, it's definitely harder.

At least we'll have a bit more time to figure it out.