You know, I have to say I was actually strangely pleased with that New York Times headline this morning. Hillary Clinton upsets Barack Obama.
Hillary Clinton, wife of Bill Clinton, former leader of the free world, was the underdog in a race against an until recently unknown urban black guy from the south side of Chicago via Hawaii and Indonesia named Barack Obama. This is a guy whose punchline in every stump speech during his 2004 Senate race revolved around his funny name.
If that doesn't say something about how much we've already achieved in this race, I don't know what does. Clinton might be firmly back in this race, but she'll never be what she was before. Clinton's narrow, late-breaking victory was, as Dana Milbank put it this morning, "not so much a comeback as a return from the political dead."
In twelve months, Obama built a campaign from the bottom up. He didn't just out-fundraise the vaunted Clinton machine, he did it through a dramatic influx of and emphasis on small donors. He didn't just build a stronger field campaign and beat Clinton by nine points in Iowa, he did it by dramatically expanding the Democratic base, bringing out new voices and young people, and by setting up an unprecedented grassroots network of field offices that have stretched beyond Iowa into at least 22 states.
He's a candidate, who from the start of his political career envisioned himself first and foremost as an organizer.
What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer? - Barack Obama, quoted in the Chicago Reader 12/8/95
Obama's campaign continues to come close to taking down the biggest brand in Democratic party politics. We came up a few thousand votes short last night, but there will be plenty more opportunities to come.
And all this in New Hampshire too, Clinton's vaunted firewall, where her establishment support ran through the Shaheens, Kathy Sullivan, 8 of 14 Democratic state senators, the speaker, the majority leader, and most established party operatives. Obama's endorsed support came from relative new-comers, like Paul Hodes and Carol Shea-Porter.
What's also remarkable is that Obama's surge there began long before the Iowa caucus:
In spite of all that establishment support, Obama essentially managed to fight New Hampshire to a draw, an accomplishment in and of itself. And he did all this without resorting to right-wing fear-mongering about potential terrorist attacks, third-party attack ads, or lobbyist or PAC funding.
As EJ Dionne put it this week:
Clinton has not heeded her own lesson. She is campaigning in prose and has left the poetry to Barack Obama. She has answers to hard policy questions, but he has the one answer that voters are hungering for: He offers himself as the vehicle for creating a new political movement that will break the country out of a sour, reactionary political era. [...]In 1960, the articulate Adlai Stevenson compared his own oratory unfavorably with John F. Kennedy's. "Do you remember," Stevenson said, "that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, 'How well he spoke,' but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, 'Let us march.' " At this hour, Obama is the Democrats' Demosthenes. [...]
The Clinton campaign is rooted in the idea that "Experience Counts" -- ironically enough, Richard Nixon's slogan against John Kennedy in 1960. But it is Obama who may have precisely the right experience for the mood of the moment. As a community organizer early in his professional life, Obama understood his task as catalyzing citizens into building movements for change. Obama's speeches are about citizen action, assembling coalitions, forcing change through popular demand.
I'll end with an apology for having disappeared for a couple weeks. Seeing a new six-month old niece over the holidays, volunteering for the Obama campaign in the week before the Iowa caucus, and the coinciding of caucus night with the deadline for several graduate school applications combined into a something of a nightmare.
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