New Hampshire Primary Predictions: Obama Wins Big, Clinton's Demise Greatly Exaggerated

Tonight will once again be a banner night for Democrats. We can now count in our heads what we all knew in our hearts. Our base is energized. Our candidates are charismatic and historic. Independent/DTS and first-time voters are embracing our message in record numbers. And post-Bush Republicans find themselves teetering precariously on the edge of a total electoral meltdown, a free-for-all race to the bottom which might continue to leave blood on the floor all the way to their Convention in September.
 
At this point, it would be an act of bunker-induced denial to bet against Senator Barack Obama winning by healthy margins in at least two, if not all, of next three battleground states: New Hampshire tonight, Nevada on January 19, and South Carolina on January 26. I repeat: he is not a fluke.
 
He’s not just riding a wave of electoral momentum. He’s proving to be the first leader of our generation who can truly turn the explosive power of a new and dynamic social vocabulary into real, measurable, collective political action. Like President Clinton himself, who famously "felt our pain," Obama has the remarkable ability to say what we’re thinking before we think it -- and to say it more forcefully and eloquently than we ever could.
 
At its core, there’s nothing new about a message of hope and change. Every Democratic leader since RFK has carried a different note of that same song. But, whether it’s the man or the moment, Obama has found a way to make change sound revolutionary.
 
He’s skewing so wide and so young that even my two-month-old daughter Violet (see picture) has crawled enthusiastically onto the bandwagon (these young voters really ARE independent).
 
And yet ... I can’t help thinking that, as the national mainstream media rushes tonight to eulogize Hillary Clinton’s candidacy (the same media who once her branded her prospective nomination as “inevitable”), they will be greatly exaggerating her demise.
 
It’s not just that America’s political graveyard is littered with the bodies of those who’ve underestimated the Clintons. It’s that, even after a year of campaigning for national office, we have yet to see Obama’s second act, let alone his third, and we have no idea how he will respond when the media pendulum inevitably swings back in Hillary’s favor.
 
No, Hillary Clinton still has an opportunity to right the ship but only if she seizes it by taking control of her own campaign and navigating in the proper direction.

After all, as Chris Bowers astutely observes in this blog post, in the race for actual delegates, she still enjoys a decided advantage as long as she can make a stand on February 5th, the so-called "Tsunami Tuesday" showdown of 22 states, including California.
 
But, like change in Washington, wishing it won’t make it so. So, while Senator Clinton continues to make the case that she is "making change happen," let’s start with her current campaign strategy. A few suggestions: 

1. Send a signal to current and prospective supporters that she "gets it." Her California team is the best in the business, but her national team is too insular and solicitous and needs a long-overdue shakeup. They woefully underestimated the playing field and misplayed the expectations game in Iowa, primarily because they were weighted down by their own tacit "electability" message.
2. Recognize that, when it comes to message, polls aren’t crystal balls and overly-calculated platitudes underscore one of her perceived weaknesses. Speechifying is Obama’s game. Hillary needs to start trusting her instincts and speaking her mind, as she did yesterday by letting her carefully-crafted guard down even for a second. When she does, she’s sublime.
3. Start playing to her strengths. Throughout this campaign, Obama has continued to float 5,000 feet above the fray on a cloud of rhythmic, high-minded rhetoric, an elevation that Senator Clinton cannot and should not attempt to reach. Meanwhile, entrance and exit polling is consistently showing that voters have no earthly idea what Obama would do as President to accomplish any his lofty goals. As Matt Bai writes in his insightful book, The Argument, "Successful political arguments aren’t built on the common values that all American share but on the arguments that lay out how, as a country, we can best live up to them." It’s time for the well-vetted Hillary and her allies to start asking "where’s the beef," because it’s a algebraic political certainty that, if we don’t, Republicans will.
4. Ignore Edwards. He’s Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense. Not to mention too politically tone-deaf to realize that his competition is Obama, not Clinton.
5. Skip South Carolina and take the campaign national, going for broke in her multiple "home states" and California on February 5. She can no longer afford to go head-to-head with Obama in every "town square" state until there’s a discernible momentum shift because, if she does, there won’t be. This is a delegate game, pure and simple, and Tsunami Tuesday is her Super Bowl.

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