The Why Game

People are looking for answers as to why the pollsters got it all wrong. Look, there are a lot of possible indicators here. Hillary dropped a mailer essentially saying that Obama wasn't reliable on keeping abortion legal the weekend before the primary (a largely evidence-free charge), which could explain the women's vote. There's the lingering Bradley effect. There's the fact that Hillary had Michael Whouley doing his field (he's the guy who pulled John Kerry out of the fire in Iowa). It could simply be that we're pretty much tied, and Obama represents a state from the Midwest and Clinton represents one from the Northeast. But it's undeniable that what was happening to Clinton, from all the media and not just Tweety-bird, was pretty reprehensible, and to the extent that they were upbraided tonight, that they were stopped in their tracks from writing epitaphs prematurely, I'm happy. Here's Tom Brokaw:

BROKAW: You know what I think we’re going to have to do?

MATTHEWS: Yes sir?

BROKAW: Wait for the voters to make their judgment.

MATTHEWS: Well what do we do then in the days before the ballot? We must stay home, I guess.

BROKAW: No, no we don’t stay home. There are reasons to analyze what they’re saying. We know from how the people voted today, what moved them to vote. You can take a look at that. There are a lot of issues that have not been fully explored during all this.

But we don’t have to get in the business of making judgments before the polls have closed. And trying to stampede in effect the process.

Look, I’m not just picking on us, it’s part of the culture in which we live these days. I think that the people out there are going to begin to make judgments about us if we don’t begin to temper that temptation to constantly try to get ahead of what the voters are deciding, in many cases, as we learned in New Hampshire when they went into the polling booth today or in the last three days. They were making decisions very late.

The voters may well have said "Shut the hell up and stop stampeding this process." Having campaign-hardened, sometimes-beaten, victorious candidates is a good thing. John Kerry had the crown put on his head and it turned out he had a glass jaw. I hope that Iowa and New Hampshire now cancel each other out, and that we move into the other states tuning out the superficialities and focused on the actual issues that ought to matter.

A boy can dream, no?

UPDATE: Just to shake it up, I also mostly endorse the sentiments of my pal thereisnospoon. I still find John Edwards the man I'd most like to see in the White House, and I still think that Clinton is the least acceptable nominee remaining, for reasons I'll get into tomorrow. But OK, now we get to see who can get down into the dirt, inspire, do the hard work, and win.