The brief interregnum between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary may be remembered as a time when it appeared that the magical qualities ascribed to Barack Obama included an ability to suspend all the ordinary rules of politics. Everything about Obama’s Iowa triumph seemed to defy history and shred doubts about his candidacy, including his relative lack of Washington experience. Relying on college kids to win a race normally controlled by geriatrics was thought to be tactical folly. Obama, though, won a majority of voters under thirty, who, according to the Obama campaign, made up nine per cent of the Iowa electorate in 2004 and climbed to twenty-two per cent this year. It was also a tenet of conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton had a tight grip on female voters, and yet Obama beat her by five points among women. Following in the path of Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, and Howard Dean, Obama was typed as the candidate of Starbucks liberals (latte having long ago replaced Chardonnay in the iconography of the pundits), someone with little working-class appeal who could never break out of the demographic borders of the young and well educated. But, remarkably, in Iowa he fought Hillary Clinton to a draw among union households and bested John Edwards and Clinton among Independents and Republicans. Furthermore, the results in Iowa seemed to affirm the idea that Obama’s exotic Kansan-Kenyan ancestry was not a liability but an asset, a visual reminder of the kind of transformation he preaches.
For those five days, Obama made politics seem effortless. Victory is generally accompanied by more sweat and grit than Obama appeared to be investing in New Hampshire. There were echoes of his 2004 Senate race, when he did not so much defeat his hapless opponents as benefit from their self-immolation. Back then, his chief primary opponent, Blair Hull, never recovered from the release of divorce records in which his ex-wife accused him of threatening to kill her, and Obama’s presumed general-election opponent, Jack Ryan, quit the campaign after the release of child-custody records in which his ex-wife said that he tried to pressure her to have sex in front of patrons at various clubs. There was never, of course, that level of tabloid drama inside the Clinton campaign—not even remotely—but Obama’s Iowa win did start a panic in Hillaryland. According to sources on her campaign team, if Clinton had lost in New Hampshire, several senior advisers, including her communications director, Howard Wolfson, were planning to offer their resignation, and Clinton was prepared to skip the next two contests, Nevada and South Carolina, a decision that could have ceded all the momentum, and even the nomination, to Obama.
In hindsight, the media may have become so caught up in the sense of destiny that enveloped Obama’s campaign after Iowa that it misinterpreted every sign of a Clinton rebound as one of further decline. During the debate the Saturday before the vote, Clinton forcefully challenged the idea that her opponents were messengers of that incessant mantra “change.” She also managed to slightly alter her message of “thirty-five years of experience” to “thirty-five years of change.” In the gymnasium where reporters watched the event, the volume was cranked up on the speakers, and her outburst sounded harsh. Afterward, there was a lively discussion among reporters about whether the episode was simply harmful to Clinton or a meltdown akin to Howard Dean’s infamous scream. An Obama aide obligingly stoked that narrative. “I think it was a jarring moment,” he said. “And my guess is she seemed extremely hot, and I can’t imagine that anybody that viewed that for any amount of time didn’t come away with having been very surprised at her reaction.”
Two days later, Clinton’s welling up in response to a question about surviving the rigors of campaigning became an instant staple on cable news, where it was treated more as a continuation of the Hillary-in-crisis story line than as a turning point in the final days of the New Hampshire campaign. Similarly, when Bill Clinton lashed out at the press for being soft on Obama, or failed to draw a big crowd, reporters pounced, asking whether he wasn’t, in fact, a millstone for his wife.
After the debate, a haggard and sweaty Mark Penn, Hillary’s chief pollster and strategist, accused Obama of changing positions on the war, energy policy, health care, and other issues. “You’ll begin to find the contradictions in what people say,” Penn instructed the reporters, “and when you do that I think that this very powerful thought that she laid out—that it’s not just about what you say but it’s about what you do and the actions you take—I think that that will catch fire here and change the dynamic of this race.” Nobody believed him. In fact, anonymous leaks in the Clinton campaign blamed Penn for losing Iowa, and this manic press conference had an air of desperation. A few feet away, Obama’s chief strategist magnanimously turned the other cheek. Obama “did not get in this race to tear down Hillary Clinton,” David Axelrod said, sounding the airy note of a campaign coasting to victory. “He got in this race to lift this country up.”
Like the press, Obama’s team missed signs of Clinton’s resurgence. Unlike earlier campaign events, which were shorter and more controlled, Clinton now endured grinding two-hour sessions where she answered questions in numbing detail. At one stop in Manchester, she promised to create “a government blogging team” that would help keep taxpayers informed. She had an unshakable faith that small things mattered. She drew appreciative applause when she said that she would simplify college loan applications and when she commiserated with her audience about the price of gasoline. Meanwhile, Obama delivered his customary inspirational speeches, full of rhetorical flight but light on detail, in which he tried to move voters by making them feel as if they were part of history. All the intensity, all the joy, seemed to be with Obama. Spectators often fled Clinton’s events before they ended, while at Obama’s the crowds crushed in around him after the last standing ovation.
Clinton turned these differences to her advantage. By then she had a new slogan: “Rhetoric vs. reality.” She insinuated that while Obama evokes comparisons to Martin Luther King, Jr., she was Lyndon Johnson. “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” she told Fox News. “It took a President to get it done.” She mocked Obama for raising “false hopes” and hinted to one audience that if Obama were elected Al Qaeda would strike America to test him. “I don’t think it was by accident that Al Qaeda decided to test the new Prime Minister,” she said, of the attempts in Great Britain to plant bombs after Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair. When Bill Clinton dismissed Obama’s antiwar purity as a “fairy tale,” it was easy to think that that’s how the Clintons wanted voters to view the entire Obama phenomenon.
During those five days in New Hampshire, the nation seemed to be witnessing the sad and panicked decline of a generation in Democratic politics, embodied in one baby-boom couple. But that is not how a plurality of the voters saw it. Clinton’s debate performance was not viewed as strident; rather, it provoked sympathy, especially from female voters, who seemed to find Clinton’s response to a question about whether she was likable (“That hurts my feelings”) more appealing than Obama’s chilly contribution (“You’re likable enough”). A Clinton adviser told me that it reminded him of a famous moment in a 2000 debate during Clinton’s first Senate campaign, when her opponent, Representative Rick Lazio, walked over to her podium and demanded that she sign a campaign-finance pledge. What some saw as a clever stunt by Lazio was quickly reinterpreted as an obnoxious provocation. (As the jargon had it, he had violated her space.) Hillary’s misty TV moment, rather than being seen as the Ed Muskie-like nadir of her campaign, would be remembered as the catalyst for reversing Obama’s Iowa victory among women. Not surprisingly, women make up the same percentage of the electorate in New Hampshire as they do in Iowa, but this time Hillary won them over by twelve points.
Bill Clinton’s role in the campaign was routinely second-guessed and mocked by the media, but the results show that he did more good than harm. Most Democrats in New Hampshire are not as cynical about his Presidency as reporters tend to be. I walked into Souhegan High School, in Amherst, where he was holding a rally, and was greeted by two signs. One pointed to the Miss New Hampshire Trunk Show, where young women were milling about in revealing evening wear and tiaras; another pointed to the Clinton event. When someone joked that we would know where Clinton had been if he showed up late to his own event, one of his fans replied sternly that she didn’t care what he did in his private life—she just wanted her daughter to witness the election of the first female President. At least in New Hampshire, Clinton nostalgia proved to be a more powerful force than Clinton fatigue. Eighty-three per cent of New Hampshire voters had a favorable opinion of the former President, and those who felt that way voted for Hillary Clinton over Obama, forty-three to thirty-three.
So Obama had not suspended the rules of politics after all; his pre-Iowa demographic obstacles reasserted themselves in New Hampshire. Obama lost the working class, the less educated, and those more concerned about economic issues. He lost by just two points over all, but his coalition shrank back toward the narrow band of Democrats that has doomed reform candidates in previous elections. Both campaigns agree that Hillary’s victory rested largely on two late-breaking developments: a surge of support from women voters and a drop-off among Independents for Obama.
Of all the worrisome trends that reappeared for Obama in New Hampshire, the most vexing may be the potential impact of race. Pollsters are trying to determine whether he experienced the so-called “Bradley effect.” In 1982, when the African-American mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, ran for governor, the final polls showed him with an average lead of eight points over his white Republican rival, George Deukmejian. And yet Deukmejian won, by a point. A similar phenomenon occurred in Virginia in 1989, when L. Douglas Wilder ran for governor against a white opponent, Marshall Coleman. He appeared to be leading by ten points but won by less than one. In both cases, white voters were more willing to tell pollsters that they supported the black candidate than they were to actually vote for him.
Did Obama experience a similar fate in New Hampshire? The evidence is murky, but his campaign believes the question is important enough to warrant study. When I asked a senior Obama adviser whether the Bradley effect was a possible explanation for the gap between the final poll numbers, which showed Obama leading by an average of eight points, and the ultimate outcome, he replied, “Definitely.” He added, “If so, then the question is: what’s different between Iowa and New Hampshire? It could be that the socially acceptable thing in front of your neighbor at a caucus could be different than what you do in a secret ballot. Obviously, that’s something we’re going to be trying to figure out as we go forward, primarily through polling. I know people are working on ways of asking questions about getting at people’s attitudes about race. We’re working on this.”
Since most voters won’t admit to having any racial bias, Obama’s campaign will have to be more creative with the questions they ask. Keith Reeves, a political scientist at Swarthmore, has studied the Bradley effect closely. In order to test for racial bias, he asked white voters about their attitudes toward welfare and blacks. Using a scale of one to seven, voters were asked to say if blacks as a group were more likely “to prefer to be self-supporting” or “to live on welfare.” Reeves told me, “That ends up being a very interesting predictor of how whites feel about African-Americans as a group but also whether they transpose those feelings onto the African-American who is running. It’s less likely to lend itself to social-desirability bias. Whites can answer that question without being seen as racist.”
Reeves says that there’s no evidence yet of the Bradley effect operating in New Hampshire, but at least one of the conditions normally associated with the phenomenon was present: lots of undecided voters. “The voting booth is tantamount to the confessional—it’s the secrecy of the ballot that is the critical issue,” Reeves said. “One thing we found that was surprising was when you have instances of a fairly large percentage of undecided white voters, they flee to the white candidate. I’ve been looking at the polling on Obama, and there was a sizable amount of undecided voters at the end.”
Other pollsters who study this question are convinced that the Bradley effect is a vanishing vestige of the nineteen-eighties. David Bositis, of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, points out that Obama’s percentage of the vote on primary day was identical to the average percentage he was receiving in preëlection polls. “The problem in the polling was entirely in their estimates for Hillary Clinton,” Bositis said. “There was absolutely no Bradley effect, and there has not been a Bradley effect for many years.” He went on to cite recent statewide elections featuring a black candidate against a white candidate: “For instance, Harold Ford, Jr.,’s polling in Tennessee was perfect. The public polls called the race perfectly when Deval Patrick was elected governor of Massachusetts. Lynn Swann in Pennsylvania, Blackwell in Ohio. All of their estimates were very good. It’s not that white people are not going to vote for a black candidate. That is so yesterday.”
He may be right, but the fact that Obama’s campaign thinks the problem is worth further inquiry and that race has once again become the subject of widespread chatter could be an ominous development for his candidacy. The best hope for an Obama victory was to kill the race issue in the crib of Iowa and New Hampshire, both of which have overwhelmingly white electorates. Racial politics have been refreshingly absent from this campaign, partly because of the lack of diversity in the first two states and partly because Obama has never made his race central to his campaign. That’s about to change, as Nevada, with its large Hispanic population, and South Carolina, with its large black population, prepare to vote. Obama has an interest in downplaying his race in both states. There are lingering tensions between the Hispanic and black communities which he doesn’t want to inflame, and some residual skepticism among black voters concerning Obama’s electability among whites. Interestingly, in the final days of the New Hampshire campaign, when defeat looked certain for Clinton, it was Hillary’s aides who started talking privately about racial politics. They argued that on February 5th, when twenty-two states vote, Hillary’s fire wall would be Hispanic voters in the largest states, such as California and New York.
On the morning after Clinton’s victory, I talked to Sergio Bendixen, one of her pollsters, who specializes in the Hispanic vote. “In all honesty, the Hispanic vote is extremely important to the Clinton campaign, and the polls have shown—and today is not a great day to cite polls—that even though she was slipping with women in Iowa and blacks in South Carolina, she was not slipping with Hispanics,” he said. “The fire wall doesn’t apply now, because she is in good shape, but before last night the Hispanic vote was going to be the most important part of her fire wall on February 5th.” The implications of that strategy are not necessarily uplifting.
When I asked Bendixen about the source of Clinton’s strength in the Hispanic community, he mentioned her support for health care, and Hispanic voters’ affinity for the Clinton era. “It’s one group where going back to the past really works,” he said. “All you need to say in focus groups is ‘Let’s go back to the nineties.’ ” But he was also frank about the fact that the Clintons, long beloved in the black community, are now dependent on a less edifying political dynamic: “The Hispanic voter—and I want to say this very carefully—has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” ♦
