How to explain Clinton's win?

It was mostly a rebellion by

women voters against the media

Most major media outlets had written

Clinton's obituary and could barely

conceal their joy in doing so

Voters, especially women voters,

said: hang on, not so fast.

It is in the nature of journalism that it surfs the wave

As the wave builds we ride it. As it dissolves

we hop off and wait for the next one

But Hillary Clinton's win in the 2008

New Hampshire Democratic primary has so completely

confounded press predictions that it would be scandalous

if we simply hopped on to the next wave without saying

anything about how wrong we all were

The truth is that far too much of what we have said

and written about New Hampshire has simply been

the recycling of assumptions and prejudices,

rather than the reporting of facts

or even the exercise of acumen or wisdom

Hacks Forced to Eat Their Words

No matter what you think about Hillary Clinton, no matter how this campaign turns out, there is undeniable satisfaction in watching the pundit class being forced to eat the words of its premature obituaries.

The strategists who were called morons are suddenly geniuses again. The candidate and her husband, who were the subject of such undisguised journalistic venom just 24 hours ago, are suddenly worthy of awe again.

The donors who dissed her are wondering whether they can retract with impunity. The White House staffers-in-waiting who danced on her grave are hoping they said nothing incriminating on the record.

If there were any justice, a number of chattering-class reputations would now be irrecuperable.

But even in an age of Google and YouTube, don't count on it.

Some of the very media wizards who declared Hillary dumb and dead are already chiding savants, pundits and gurus for getting it so wrong -- as though they themselves were not the subjects and objects of their own amnesiac scorn.

To switch the metaphor, I wonder whether this humiliating turnabout, played out in real time over a very short period right in front of the American people, could be the MSM's Katrina.

Political media, you've done a heckuva job.

Hillary's Stunning Win [Original]

Hillary Clinton's narrow victory in New Hampshire on Tuesday night is one of the most stunning results I've ever seen.

Her own staff woke up that morning dreading a double-digit loss. Heads were going to roll. No one, not the candidate herself, had any remote reason to hope that she would come especially close, let alone pull off a win.

Something major happened in the last 24 hours. Consider that about 280,000 people voted in the Democratic primary. In Monday's polling, Barack Obama was ahead by as much as 12%. That represents, given actual turnout, a lead of 30,000 votes.

Clinton won by a little more than 6,000. So - again, in the space of just 24 hours - a huge number of voters, thousands of them, changed their minds. Why?

I think it was mostly a rebellion by women voters against the media. Most major media outlets had written Clinton's obituary and could barely conceal their joy in doing so. And voters, especially women voters, said: not so fast.

I've seen this happen before. In the fall of 2000, she debated her opponent in the race for the New York senate seat she won that year. The opponent, Rick Lazio, strode over to her podium and wagged his finger in her face.

The media loved the moment, thought Lazio looked tough and declared him the winner.

But over the next couple days, it emerged in polling that people, especially women, thought Clinton had won the debate.

The media missed what had really happened, and reported with glee on Clinton's alleged comeuppance. And they helped drive voters, mostly but not wholly women, into Clinton's camp. She took a lead in the polls after that debate that she never relinquished.

I'm certain that's what happened in New Hampshire on Tuesday. The media got obnoxious, and the voters slapped them down. So now we've got a race.

The question going forward is, did anything else happen in those 24 hours? Did voters decide that experience wasn't so bad after all, and that maybe change was overrated?

Did they start to buy the Clinton argument - not credible, in my view - that Obama is without substance? Did Bill Clinton's shameful "fairytale" rant, which deserved to cost his wife thousands of votes, instead have a positive effect for her?

In sum, we don't know yet whether Clinton's shocking win was just a reaction against the piling on, or a deeper embrace of her methodical arguments, or a deeper rejection of Obama's civic spiritualism?

I suspect the former, but at the least as far as Clinton is concerned it has bought her time to figure all this out.

It will be interesting to watch her strategy now. When we all thought she was going to be hammered, the sense was that she was going to attack Obama hard. So maybe now she doesn't do that.

Is it possible, paradoxically, that Obama will end up being helped by that? It's a little irony worth noting.

Even if so, he will clearly have to fight a lot harder now. For the last four days, all the candidates were chasing him and trying to sound like him.

That ends today. Now, he and Clinton will battle to set the terms of debate. If he still emerges the nominee, he'll be a stronger one for what happened in New Hampshire.

MSM Recycle Bullshit

Every journalist to whom I have spoken in New Hampshire over the past few days has used the exact same phrase at some point or another. The Obama victory in Iowa - what a story!

The Obama defeat in New Hampshire - what a story! Huckabee's success - what a story! Huckabee's failure - what a story! The McCain resurrection - what a story! The Clinton collapse - what a story! The Clinton comeback - what a story! Next stop South Carolina - what a story! It just goes on. What a story!

And, yes, this presidential is indeed an extraordinary and epic political tale. The first eight days of 2008 have produced political dramas that those of us who have been privileged to cover them will never forget.

A group of us sat down to dinner in Dover, New Hampshire, after the final rallies last night and agreed: this is about as good a story as we will cover in all our lives. For journalists, this election is like striking gold.

So isn't a pity that, given how good the story is, we get it wrong so often?

I don't know how many of us have said over the last few days that Obama has been riding a wave of popular will for radical political change.

Or how many of us have said that this New Hampshire primary marks the end to the Clinton era that began in another New Hampshire primary 16 years ago.

But the essential answer is that most of us have said these things, or something of the sort, over the past few days.

We have praised them and we have buried them and, much of the time, we have all been plain wrong.

It is in the nature of journalism that it surfs the wave. As the wave builds we ride it. As it dissolves we hop off and wait for the next one.

But Hillary Clinton's win in the 2008 New Hampshire Democratic primary has so completely confounded press predictions that it would be scandalous if we simply hopped on to the next wave without saying anything about how wrong we all were.

As the counting began in the primary it was clear that most of the US networks preferred to ignore the fact that Clinton was ahead of Obama - the real story of the evening - because they assumed that Obama would soon be ahead.

They were in denial about the facts because the facts did not suit the narrative that so many had scripted in advance. It was gloriously humiliating - and of course it went wholly unmentioned.

The truth is that far too much of what we have said and written about New Hampshire has simply been the recycling of assumptions and prejudices, rather than the reporting of facts or even the exercise of acumen or wisdom.

An American colleague complained the other day that the demands of his paper and his website and his blog meant that he had hardly done any reporting at all this year. We all know that feeling.

Modern journalism demands authority from journalists while denying them the time to be authoritative.

I'm not pretending there is a simple answer to this endemic problem. But it might be a start if we stopped pretending that we are as knowledgeable as we affect to be.

Too much modern journalism is little better than informed - and sometimes uninformed - guesswork.

When we get it as wrong as we did in New Hampshire we should admit it, not go into denial. If we did, what a story that would be.