MuadDib

I'm curious what the Obama supporters here make of the New Hampshire primary. I think it's very telling that a candidate who had a double-digit lead in the polls 24 hours before the vote would end losing by 2%-3%. All the more so because New Hampshire is a more typical blue state than Iowa. Honestly, I did not believe Hillary was going to come back and win New Hampshire like Bill did, but I believed she was going to turn it around on Super Tuesday and take it to the White House. Now it looks like she'll get a boost in South Carolina, even if she doesn't take it, and then go on to dominate Nevada and Florida. Granted the latter doesn't have delegates, but I think a big win by anyone in Florida will sway a lot of voters since even non-voters are fully cognizant of effect it has on the general election. Hell a Republican hasn't won the White House without Florida since 1924!

I'm also curious what my fellow politicos here at TFP think account for Hillary's victory. Personally, I think her 'episode' yesterday in which she teared up helped her. I also think that Bill's last minute speech taking Obama to task for, among other things, his free pass by the media. Both of these things were criticized heavily by the media and political insiders, but I suppose those were the same people who said Obama by around 10% in New Hampshire.

Finally, what do you all think this entails for future primaries? I certainly don't think this marks any sort of death knell for anyone (not even Edwards or Giuliani), but I do think that this is a much more reeling defeat for Obama than Iowa was for Clinton. I say this because after Iowa everyone got so caught up in the Obama victory that many media outlets, pundits, and supporters from all camps were declaring Obama victories at least all the way through Super Tuesday. Hillary, on the other hand, was expected to win for almost a year and the tides only recently had changed and now, not long after, she has seemingly stemmed them with a most unlikely of victories. Declarations of Barak's 'inevitable' were just as adamantly posited, but now seem ridiculously short lived. His 'we can' slogan almost seems to have been co-opted by the Clinton campaign as she has lost the front-runner sheen and now has the comeback kid aura on her side that her husband rode all the way to Pennsylvania Ave.

(PS: Let's not rehash old Clinton-Obama arguments here, there are plenty of threads to find those. Let's discuss the democratic primary in light of developments from Iowa onwards and only talk about character, electability, etc as they apply to the rest of the election season)

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"The courts that first rode the warhorse of virtual representation into battle on the res judicata front invested their steed with near-magical properties." ~27 F.3d 751