Well, so much for my title. I was right about the GOP win in New Hampshire, but unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few days, you will know that I missed the Dem Party’s prediction, not by a little, but by a long shot. I am happy to report, however, that I was not the only one. It seems that everyone was wrong, even the campaigns themselves, both who predicted a big Obama victory.

I believe that everyone was surprised, and as a result, I can claim that the New Hampshire Dem Party primary was anomalous. There were a number of factors that went in to the polls being wrong. First and foremost, everyone believed the hype. This is the primary problem. Not only the pundits on the television and in the news paper, but the candidates, the bloggers and the voters. There was a special sort of aura that surrounds a recent winner, especially is he or she doesn’t look like other winners. That aura was attached to Obama after Iowa.

But somewhere between the time he won in Iowa and the time Clinton won in New Hampshire, a good portion of the population in that strange state didn’t get the memo. Instead, they acted like they were supposed to act and voted for Hillary Clinton. So many people acted before New Hampshire that Obama was going to walk in and take that state. But see, the real problem is that they were excited that he did as well as he did in Iowa. That was the weird election, and so people assumed that the entire primary would be weird and Obama would take the nomination in a walk.

They forgot long standing political trends in the United States. In fact we all did. Today it’s damage control: “How did we get it so wrong? How did we not see the women vote? How did we not predict the independents breaking as hard as they did for McCain?” Etc. The way we all overlooked this is because we forgot that we were in the United States, where it is very difficult for people who don’t pay the right lip service can’t play the game, where it really doesn’t matter what a person’s true positions are, it is how they do on TV which matters more. Why did female voters turn out for Clinton? Because they were supposed to. She is a professional politician who has been tailoring her message specifically to middle aged, working and middle class women. Period. What is more surprising is that as many men as did voted for her. This is politics in the United States, and the game is simply not for new comers.

Several months ago, on the Creepy Sleepy Show, I predicted Hillary to win in New Hampshire (of course I predicted her to win in Iowa as well, I believe). All the trends pointed that way, Hillary was viewed as electable, she was (and still is) the establishment candidate and should properly be considered the incumbent, because of her name recognition, her connection with the former President of the US, etc etc etc. Plus, people tend to vote for their own, and in the United States, especially in the Democratic Party, women vote more frequently than men do. This is probably one of the most important factors in Hillary Clinton’s success last night.

One other thing which helped Hillary is the demographic of age. It is a well known fact that middle aged people vote more often than the youth. Barack Obama is 46 years old, Hillary Clinton has recently turned 60. Obama is appealing to young voters, because it can be argued, he is at the leading edge of Generation X. He is like me, he probably liked much of the same music as I liked, he probably has a good number of the same attitudes that I have, etc. Hillary Clinton, who (through no fault of her own, mind you) is a decade and a half older, more closely associated with the 1990’s than the 21st century, and perhaps more closely associated with a different world, where we were not afraid all the time. She is a year and a half older than my mother. Why would I as a young person be interested in voting for her? But you see, people my age generally do not vote, and it takes a massive amount of time and energy to get people my age to go and vote. This is Obama’s problem. But Clinton’s voters are going anyway, because that’s what people of the preceding generation do. As you get older, you tend to vote more often. Maybe because of how these people were raised (in the 50’s, for example, when America was constantly portrayed as great and worth participating in), maybe its because they have been screwed over by the system more often that they have a greater stake in trying to reform it… Who knows why that is, but Hillary’s voters, the ones she has been appealing to her entire campaign, were going to show up, and Obama’s were not.

Now, it can’t be said to be all demographics. There are serious structural obstacles to change in this society, even if its entirely fictional. Clinton has correctly bet that people prefer experience to inexperience (the dichotomy of experience versus change is not correct. Those two are not mutually exclusive, and this a major problem for Obama.) Clinton was successful in presenting her experience as the primary reason that a paranoid paternalized society should go and vote for her, and the sheep in this country, at this period of time, the society half of which still believes that Hussein had something to do with the attacks on September 11, 2001, (in spite of the fact that the people responsible for that disinformation have publicly denied its veracity a number of times) ate her message up. Americans apparently want to be protected by a father figure in government, even as they rail against big government and high taxes. Go figure that one out! Hillary Clinton may not cut a father figure, but she sure does cut a paternalistic one.

Plus there was the thing the news reports have been complaining about for three days now: Clinton crying at the same time as she continued to attack Obama. My wife commented that Hillary is in a rather bad position. She is a woman expected to live and work in a man’s world: If she acts too manly, people accuse her of crassness and opportunism, if she shows emotion and acts too feminine, she is accused of being weak. It’s almost a no win situation for her. This is why I personally believe that her fit on television, where the shell broke down a little bit, regardless of how scripted it was (and as a professional politician, you can bet that that had at least some scripting to it.) was fairly ineffective.

I am guilty of listening to what the television said. I should follow my gut. Obama may be a good speaker, but so is John Edwards. Obama may inspire people, but so does John Edwards. And yet, one wins in Iowa and the other won’t win a single state. Obama’s problem is (not counting a general white fear of a black president; I mean what could that possibly mean? Reparations? Widespread mysogyny? Opening the boarders to people of colors other than white? Yeah, that terrifies White America, whether white America likes to admit it or not.) that Hillary Clinton is the one that is supposed to win. It is not an inevitability, it is simple demographics and attitudes in this country. She is an insider, and Obama is an outsider. The Party base supports her because she is the known commodity, and as much as they claim to want change, what they really would prefer is to not be bothered. A Barack Obama presidency would require far too much attention on the part of Democrats.

Basically, his problem is not providing people with false hope. His problem is that he is challenging them to hope in the first place. This challenge requires too much attention and effort on complacent Americans, and the pay off will not be immediately apparent, nor will it be that meaningful in the life of the average individual American, who after all, is the one who votes. Better just to vote with the safe candidate, who has already promised to do things for us, who will protect us, and who can show a little emotion on cue to prove that she is a human (a status which the current President doesn’t share among most Democratic voters.)

We’ll see, but for now, I will go ahead and predict that Obama will win Nevada because of his endorsement by the Culinary Workers’ Union which he received today, and in South Carolina, where race will probably trump gender (but it will be close, especially because Edwards will be competing there). After that, it’s anyone’s guess.

Serenely,
Still the Wizard of S
W Doc