Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Wow!

OK, so New Hampshire's over. I pretty much got the Repubs down, with some ordering issues in the guys past the top two. I didn't expect Huckabee to take third in a New England state, to be honest.

But as y'all know by now, the big story is the Clinton victory. And I, as an Obama supporter, say good for her. Everybody ended up being wrong for a variety of reasons, but I'm not sure just saying "they were wrong" tells the whole story at all.

Basically, I think that the Iowa bounce for Obama was illusory at best. Sure, I fell for it just as much as anybody else, but it seems ridiculous to believe, especially in retrospect, that New Hampshire voters would have effectively ceded their decision to Iowans. What we saw, with those double-digit leads going into the primary yesterday, was probably a natural result of the super-compressed time between Iowa and New Hampshire. The swing from Obama's double-digit lead to a two or three point loss was a big one, but it wasn't as big as was the lead from Clinton's double-digit lead to Obama's double-digit lead was in the first place. If we leave aside the Iowa bounce as illusory, Obama still seems to have done pretty remarkably well in New Hampshire last night, though the last week's polls will make it seem as though this result is sounding his campaign's death knells.

Just as it was dumb as hell to dismiss Clinton's campaign as dead after the Iowa results, it's similarly premature to write off Obama after the results in New Hampshire. What we've got here is a real race, folks. Break out the popcorn.

Fargus...