The 2008 New Hampshire Primary Aftermath: Gender politics trumps liberal white guilt, the war hero beats the CEO

A lot will be written and said about the aftermath of the 2008 New Hampshire primary in the coming months and maybe even the coming years. It would make a great case study in presidential politics. And, with so many people contributing to the process - regular/mainstream and alternative media, like citizen journalists and blogs - there is a lot to take in. But for this political junkie, looking at the very long [and yes, too long] campaign and the ultimate outcome, it is easy to call the process a complete mess of monumental proportions, while at the same time, wondering how long our state can hang on to the first-in-the-nation primary status. What the primary did do though was defy the Democratic naysayers who claimed that because New Hampshire was not “diverse enough,” minorities and women could not get a fair shot. Please note: A woman finished first, a black man finished second, and a Latino man finished fourth, in one of the whitest states in the country. Hopefully, the diversity card will not be played against New Hampshire [and Iowa for that matter] ever again.

On the Republican side, grassroots politicking and honesty by one candidate trumped the millions poured in by another candidate. Republicans, with the help of independents, also denied the more negative candidate of the top two the prize.

But it is safe to say, that the days of our primary could be numbered for other reasons. A deep analysis is needed to look at the entire process. That will come later. For now, let us look at what happened yesterday. 

 

An epic Democratic battle
On the Democratic side, simply put, one of the most divisive political figures in American history was able to defy the experts, rebuke all their studies, tabulations and speculations, and squeak out a slim victory. There are rumors floating around about all kinds of dirty tricks: Pulled up signs of the competition [Note the front page photo of the local section of the Concord Monitor, with only scads of Hillary signs and no other Democrat candidate's signs. Are you telling me that the other three major Democratic campaigns, with a ton of field hands, forgot to put up signs in New London?]; the pressuring by Hillary’s attorneys to remove competing poll-checkers from the polling locations [and therefore, hampering get-out-the-vote operations of other campaigns. The Concord city clerk claimed that the rumors were news to her but the allegations made the Boston Globe and were blogged nationally. Who knows]; and even claims from some in Massachusetts that Democratic operatives flooded the southern cities of New Hampshire with fraudulent same-day voters casting votes for Clinton [Since Clinton won the southern tier cities by thousands, this needs to be investigated, not unlike those rumors about Barack Obama’s campaign busing voters into the Iowa Caucuses from neighboring Illinois].

Countering those rumors are all the acceptable methods of campaigning which seemed to have worked for Clinton: An effective GOTV operation; phone calls, phone calls, and phone calls; the bombardment of voters with endless amounts of content [however vague]; staying focused on said vague message; and a flurry of last minute negativity, attacking Obama. These negative attacks were targeted with precision, using divisive issues in New Hampshire like abortion and taxes. The Clinton campaign raised the bloody flag of abortion late with a mailer targeting obscure "present" votes Obama took when he was a state senator. He was clearly blindsided. A quick robocall effort with a former Planned Parenthood official who supported Obama countering the mailer was countered by the Clinton campaign with a long letter from women leaders from the state, backing Clinton and attacking the official saying she was no longer with Planned Parenthood. It got even uglier, in a very last minute mailer, where Clinton attacked Obama’s Social Security plan calling it a $1 trillion tax increase against hard-working families in New Hampshire. In other words, all the standard practices from the candidate’s side of things, proved to work. And, yeah, negative campaigns work.

One of the most interesting contrasts of this primary is that two of the most volatile concepts in political demographics - gender politics and liberal, white guilt - clashed with each other, creating all the spectacle of a horrific car crash. Huge sways of voters were supporting the weakest potential candidates based on all historical voting data - a woman and a black man - potentially putting the Democrats' national position in jeopardy. At the same time, if either become the nominee, politically correct Democrats will get their wish. And everyone will see if those candidates can win.

Some of the comments from voters and pundits were also truly amazing. Obama’s not really black, snarked one commenter, almost insinuating that because he was not a bit jive like the Rev. Jesse Jackson or the Rev. Al Sharpton, he was not a minority. A voter interviewed on television said she voted for Hillary because she did not want to live with the fact that if Clinton won, she did not vote for the first female president. What the hell is that? Is that any way to pick a president?

This entire process also showed that the American electorate, at least most of the Democratic voters in New Hampshire, can be swayed and motivated into action by emotions, without having any firm specifics about what a candidate supports or what they plan to do. To put it more succinctly, these voters were often voting against their own political interests based on emotion. The generic platitudes of “change,” without any concrete specific plans of what would be changed or how, were shockingly the order of the day. Feeling good about a black candidate because he delivered a great speech was more important than the white candidate who has consistently voted to protect the middle class. Being proud of the female gender and supporting that candidate trumped anything the white man had done to protect women and their families in the past.

The three major candidates at the bottom of the tallies on the Dem side - Bill Richardson, Dennis Kucinich, and to a lesser extent, John Edwards - all brought relatively firm plans to the table about how they would change things. The top two candidates tended to offer a generic and vague message. You can be critical of No Child Left Behind but what are you going to replace it with? How are you going to pay for it? Will it be more federal mandates or fewer? Gee, we don’t know, because neither of the two top tier candidates told us. How come you haven’t sponsored bills in the U.S. Senate to address the nation’s problems instead of just making speeches complaining about the Republicans?

Exit polling showed that health care, the economy and the war in Iraq were the most important issues to the Democratic voters of New Hampshire. And yet the voters cast votes against their economic interests. They awarded the win to a person who voted for the fraudulent war, continues to vote for hundreds of billions to continue the war, but yet campaigns against the war and refuses to apologize for her wrong votes. They awarded the win to the candidate whose husband had a mandate in 1992 to create a universal health care plan for voters. That candidate fritted away a mandate with secret meetings, ala Dick Cheney’s energy meetings, and destroyed the opportunity to have a plan in place now. Then-President Clinton used his political capital to give the people NAFTA, which has cost the country millions of jobs and gutted our national manufacturing and infrastructure while at the same time creating an immigration mess and assisting Republicans with a red meat issue for their voters. Do the voters of New Hampshire really have such short memories that they don't remember this?

The candidate who came in second continues to vote to fund the war but says he will end it. The health care plan he forwarded will allegedly leave some uninsured. There is no visible economic plan there either.

Only the lower tier candidates say they will stop the war, with the third place finisher apologizing for his pro-war vote. The lower tier candidates also provided the most extensive economic and health care plans.

A war hero vs. the CEO
Mitt Romney put on a very good smile on Tuesday night and maybe he is happy with the silver. But he has to be wondering, deep down, what happened. Clearly, if he were a CEO of a big company, he would be fired by the board of directors and shareholders for allowing so much wealth to go down the drain, with little to show for it. He needed a win but he will continue on.

In the end though, John McCain, assisted by endorsements and positive media coverage, was able to kick-start his campaign into gear and get it moving again. McCain was also assisted by some of his colleagues on the debate stage, with Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson, and Rudy Giuliani, piling on and dosing out some of the harshest hits of the fight so far. When Huckabee went on “The Tonight Show” and talked about how his connection to voters was that he was similar to folks they worked with, not the guy that laid them off from their job, it said it all. While the Republicans may have attempted to move to the country club right, the rank-and-file in both New Hampshire and Iowa are regular folks, driven by issues like taxes, abortion, and America’s standing in the world. They may not have a pot to tinkle in but they care, deep in their hearts.

At the same time, the three contests so far on the GOP side have clustered the field at the top. The national campaign strategies of Giuliani and Thompson are as fragile as they possibly can be, meaning it is anyone’s nomination at this point.

Fatal mistakes
Buoyed by his win in Iowa, Obama kicked into general election mode, playing up to the television and packing halls across the state. He was even nice enough to step outside to talk to the folks in line. However, there were no “town hall meetings,” no questions, and no discussion of specifics by the surging Obama. That game ended after Iowa. It was clearly a mistake.

Contrast that with the other candidates who let it fly after their stump speeches, including McCain and Edwards. Even Clinton offered to give and take, granted, in controlled audiences, where she was instantly humanized over a period of days, getting teary-eyed about the pressures of being held up to scrutiny as if we should all coronate her because she cares and knows what is best for us. Yikes.

Clinton was also able to parlay this intimacy with rhetoric which would elevate her standing with women voters, something which sank her in Iowa.

It was a one-two punch, whether calculated or not. A strong debate performance, rebuffing the attacks by the boys and then, later, a teary-eyed display on the Seacoast played up to the hilt by the media because the process is too rough on the girl who wants to play with the boys. Essentially, Clinton and other women can now have it both ways: You have to treat us equally but if you play too hard and hip-check us on the field, we’ll cry and complain and use your roughness to gain sympathy because, after all, we are just girls. What does that say about the status of women in the political world?

Maybe that is the price the boys of the future will have to pay because the boys of the past did not allow the girls to play for these many years. Fair enough. But, if that is the case, stop complaining about equality and fairness from this day forward.

From the field, there were some clear problems. While both Clinton and Obama had inside field organizations, John Edwards hired non-residents to run field, always a bad move. The Edwards campaign did have some help from people who worked on the 2004 campaign, so they were not without experience. They also had a chance to hire inside folks to work on the field organization but the lower campaign echelon passed on the opportunity.

As noted on this blog, the three top campaigns seemed to be doing a pretty good job of reaching out to voters over and over again. However, not unlike Howard Dean's effort in 2004, one could sense that the Obama campaigners were not organized well, especially late in the game, when an influx of volunteers seemed to come out of nowhere with nothing to do. Had those people been quickly trained and put into polling locations to poll check [or had they not been removed from said polling location], it might have helped. Late in the game, it also seemed as though the Obama team was targeting Edwards' voters, instead of Clinton’s voters. These types of strategies tend to solidify voters, not convince them to change. Instead of this, the campaign should have used internal polling to move on to other voters, including undecideds and independent voters. They should have also solidified their place in the cities.

Looking at the results, Obama fared well everywhere he needed to: He won most of the affluent and educated smaller cities like Concord, Keene, and Portsmouth. He won the college towns, although turnout was lower than general elections. He won the affluent suburban towns, again, that liberal white guilt. But he got clobbered in the big cities, losing handily to Clinton in Manchester, Nashua, and Salem, all places one would assume he should have done better in, due to the racial makeup of these cities. He also lost cities in the eastern part of the state, like Dover, Rochester, and Somersworth [did the hostage standoff in Rochester last year help Clinton win that city? One can only wonder ...].

On the Republican side, everything happened as expected: McCain and Romney competed with each other for the bulk of votes in the southern part of the state with Huckabee and Ron Paul performing quite well in some of the smaller, rural towns.

Gasp: The polls were wrong! Again!!
In the past, a lot has been said about polls and in many ways, the more logical explanations and deeper analysis into polling, have laid the ground work for what happened in New Hampshire on Tuesday. It also laid the foundation to debunk the efforts of those on the fringe to claim vote fraud by looking at the swing of polls. There is vote fraud. We know it. But figurers cannot base fraud allegations on exit polls or any polls, for that matter. You can use them as a guide but they are not proof.

Not only did the polls get everything wrong, they got it embarrassingly wrong. 

In Manchester on Tuesday night around 6:40 p.m., Republican pollster Frank Luntz, one of the best in the business, was holding camp just outside the front door with a handful of people. Within earshot I heard him say as I was exiting the building, “Hillary is going to lose but not as badly as expected.”

In many ways, it was great that the pollsters were all wrong. We can all hope that this will lead news organizations across the nation to halt all activity with polls. Stop manipulating the process with horse race numbers which repeatedly are proved wrong. Stop wasting the money and spend it on real reporting. Isn’t it amazing how news organizations complain and complain that they don’t have the money to do investigative reporting or look beyond the trivial as far as policy matters go but they have the money to hire pollsters? It is time to look beyond all of this and have a process that does not manipulate or fear the voters into making bad choices for themselves. That day has come.

In the end, the worst outcome of the Democratic primary is this: Once again, not unlike before, the voices of true structural change - Edwards and Kucinich - and their ideas have been stymied for a lukewarm, vague, almost light or fake change, which will not lead to any significant change at all. When Edwards calls Clinton “the status quo,” it is the truth. 

On the other side, the best outcome for voters, especially those looking for the best Republican candidate: A fractured field and anyone’s race.

For some voters, these outcomes seem to be enough. For the rest of us, God help us.

More later in a few days.