A Brief Post Mortem …
… on New Hampshire. The only big losers were the pollsters and anyone who listened to them and pronounced Hillary Clinton D.O.A. Among the latter would be me, just a little, though I specifically said I didn’t think a loss would kill her candidacy. But I took a wild-assed guess, based on everything I was reading, and had Obama getting 41 percent, not 37; and Hillary at 30, not 39. I also had John Edwards at 23 percent, not 17.
It’s morning now and I hate myself for getting sucked into the whacked polls, yet again. I get a touch of DailyKos.com fever when there’s a vote looming. But I had the bigger picture right, which was that New Hampshire was not going to be terribly consequential this time around. Give it a few days and no one will care. “Objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are.” New Hampshire looked huge to some people last night, pretty big today, smaller tomorrow … and it’ll be mostly gone by next week. Both Obama and Clinton come out of this in good shape, and I’m glad we have no foregone conclusions.
On the GOP side, at least I was right about McCain taking Romney down. No big deal, that, but it doesn’t knock Mitt out of the race. The Republicans don’t really have a legitimate contender to be president, at this point, and the Democrats have three (I still count John Edwards.) This is way OK with me. The Republican field doesn’t even impress the Republicans I know, which is profoundly weird, since they usually get get up to speed with smoke coming out of their ears, way faster than I do.
I started thinking idly about vice presidential possibilities, on the Democratic side. Funny that I can see Clinton wanting Obama to run with her, but I can’t see it working the other way around. “Vice President Hillary Clinton?” I don’t think she’d go for that. I somehow can’t see Edwards wanting to run for VP again, either. Though it might be nice to have a white male on the ticket, for old time’s sake.
I’d like to see Gen. Wesley Clark running the Department of Defense and Sen. Chris Dodd as Secretary of State.
But I’m going to try to be done with politics until next month, unless something really tickles me before so-called Super Tuesday (Feb. 5.)
jss @ January 9, 2008
