(Cross-posted at The Field.)
I wish I could keep y'all in suspense for three more days, but what will happen on Tuesday in New Hampshire is ceasing to be a mystery. However, it will still be very interesting to chronicle and analyze exactly how it goes down in the next 66 hours.
I'll start with the part that most political reporters haven't figured out, because they've never been community organizers, don't get the difference between an organizer and an "activist," and probably have a superficial and low regard for those that do that kind of work.
Watch this morning-after-Iowa video as Obama arrives in Portsmouth, in an overflowing airport hangar...
To understand why Obama’s organization really is different than that of Howard Dean and other so-called grassroots candidates in the past, pay special attention to the segment that begins shortly after two minutes, when Obama talks about his community organizing experiences:
“I also learned that being an organizer is pretty hard work. You work long hours. You’re stuck in offices sometimes. You knock on doors. You have to deal with rejection. So I always like to make sure to introduce the young organizers who are helping us to build a better America, and your Portsmouth organizer is a young man named Matt Devine… Where’s Matt? Where is he? Matt? C’mon, Matt!”
As soon as Obama mentioned "Matt," a wild applause ensued: clearly, the people assembled in the Portsmouth area already know him, like him, and feel invested in him much in the way they do about the candidate. A good organizer is the alchemic element that breaks down the wall between candidate and voter:
“Matt’s job is to get you out for the primary. That’s his job. More specifically to have you go to the primary for me. My job is to help Matt do his job. And so if there are any folks here who are still undecided about who they are going to vote for on primary day, I would like you to fill out, if I have suffiently persuasive here today, one of these supporter cards so that Matt can keep track of who he has to reach out to on primary day.”
Obama then asks for a show of hands of the undecideds, and uses the same line he used so many times in Iowa: “Matt, We’ve got some live ones here.”
Other candidates try similar things, but none with such ease and experience. They grope to mimic it, but because they haven't done it themselves, it comes off flat and insincere. The personal connection – candidate to organizer – is one of peers: in reality it is organizer to organizer. It’s the same relationship that you want all the campaign staff and volunteers to have if you want a successful campaign that is also a movement. And that’s a big part of why, if Obama wins by a landslide margin (ten points or more) on Tuesday, as I'm predicting here even before tonight's big debate, he will have done so. America may be electing a president, but it may get, in the deal, the first national community organizer-in-chief.
- Little birds that were at last night’s 100 Club Democratic dinner, aired on C-Span, have been singing in my ear since then about what went down. On the TV screen, we could see the clear edge in organizational muscle and enthusiasm that Obama enjoyed over the others.
On the ground, our sources report, the excitement was so contagious that longtime Clinton supporters found themselves putting their own signs down, rising to their feet, and chanting “Fired up! Ready to go!” One told a source, “I can’t help myself.” There was lots of talk among the attendees by people contemplating switching support from Clinton to Obama, including from hardened Democratic activists that had signed on early with the Clinton campaign. Meanwhile, Edwards didn’t show up for the event, which had 3,000 attendees. Probably when the history of this NH primary is written, last night’s dinner will be seen as signaling an important shift much as the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa was last November, and for much the same reasons. Politics, done “community organizer” style instead of in traditional electoral fashion, can lead to a critical mass of spellbinding realignment in the communities it sets out to organize. Iowa, it seems, was no temporary bump in the road. If I’m correct, it was the beginning of a new one.
- The fever continued into this morning. At Obama’s sole event today (he and his rivals are now prepping for tonight’s debate), a rally in Nashua (which earlier polls showed as Clinton Country), was so mobbed that Time’s Karen Tumulty couldn’t make it through the traffic jam:
“I had planned to attend his rally at 10 a.m. at a Nashua high school, but can't get anywhere near it. Traffic is quite literally backed up for miles. The parking lot was full an hour before the event, and people were standing in line in the snow.”
- Time's Jay Newton-Small did get into the Nashua event and reports 3,000 people showing up in a space for 1,500, the overflow was directed to a second gymnasium to watch the event on a TV screen.
- Clinton is drawing big crowds, too, 1,500 this morning, also with capacity problems. Greenfield sees disaster in the logistics of Clinton’s Merrimack High School event this morning, while Ambinder says Clinton’s victory over a local fire marshal that tried to limit the hall’s capacity gave her a chance to show “problem solving” leadership: “I thought Clinton's turn as director played well, but we'll see how several of the eminent grises in the press row -- Bob Novak, E.J. Dionne, Gwen Ifill -- interpret it.”
- Two tracking polls show NH movement from Clinton to Obama.
Suffolk University (with half the interviews conducted prior to the Iowa caucus results):
Clinton 36
Obama 29
Edwards 13
Richardson 4
So how does a poll with Clinton ahead by seven points lead me to believe that Obama will win a convincing victory on Tuesday? Pollster David Paleologos explains the trend: “(Obama has) climbed four points overnight; Hillary Clinton has dropped one.” (Field Note: If that trend continues it will be, by Monday night, Obama 41, Clinton 26.) The survey was taken January 3 and 4, with a margin-of-error of 4.38 percent.
Zogby appears to show less movement, but Zogby later tells Politico's Ben Smith that there was significant movement on the fourth day, the one group that came after the Iowa results:
First number result of January 1 to 4 interviews (second number result of December 31 to January 3):
Clinton 32 (32)
Obama 28 (26
Edwards 20 (20)
Richardson 7 (7)
Kucinich 3 (3)
Zogby, according to Smith:
"…80 percent of the poll calls -- which were placed over 24 hours ending at 2 p.m. yesterday -- were made before Obama's victory was known.
"If you take just that 20 percent -- which is a fairly small group -- you see the movement," Zogby said. "Obama up around 8, Hillary down around 4."
(Field Note: if that’s the one day shift, three more days of that would make this an historic blow-out for Obama, 40-29, and perhaps open the door for another second place opportunity for Edwards if Clinton collapses further. Obama pushing up against 50 percent, while hard to imagine, is not out of the realm of possibilities).
- Rasmussen is first-out with a NH poll taken entirely after the Iowa caucus results were known:
Obama 37
Clinton 27
Edwards 19
Richardson 8
All interviews were conducted on Friday, January 4, with a margin-of-error of 4.5 percent. Rasmussen’s previous NH poll, pre-xmas, had Clinton winning by three percentage points.
- Simon says: Clinton should take a page out of the George Bush Sr. playbook, who after coming in third in Iowa, got a fast image makeover:
In 1988, George H.W. Bush got clobbered in the Iowa caucuses, coming in third. With the New Hampshire primary just eight days away, Bush could have stuck with his game plan.
Instead, he retooled his entire image. He took off his coat and tie and put on a parka and a green-and-white baseball cap from East Coast Lumber and went to the Cuzzin Ritchie’s Truck Stop in Hampstead, N.H. He drove an 18-wheel Mack truck, had a friendly snowball fight with reporters and transformed his image from that of a privileged preppie “wimp” to that of a regular guy.
Sure, people made fun of it. Johnny Carson said in his monologue: “He went into a truck stop wearing a pair of overalls, but he had a little alligator sewn over the pocket.”
And the press asked if there was something behind Bush’s sudden transformation.
“Hell, yeah,” said Bush’s press secretary, Pete Teeley. “We’re running scared.”
George H.W. Bush won New Hampshire, the nomination and the presidency.
- Allen (lots of good stuff on Politico.com today; they seem almost liberated by the end of the Clinton inevitability narrative) transcribes Jeff Greenfield on CBS, suggesting that the Clinton campaign believes it will lose New Hampshire and South Carolina and will throw its Hail Mary pass to the big Tsunami Tuesday states on February 5.
"Oddly enough, they sound a little bit like Giuliani. They're pointing to the later states on Feb. 5. They're saying, look, Iowa was small, they're kind of denigrating the caucuses. It's one little state. Remember California, New York, Arkansas, New Jersey. I think they're setting the stage for a loss here in New Hampshire, a loss in South Carolina, where half the voters in the Democratic primary are African-Americans."
Field Note: I don’t think Clinton, Inc. is playing rope-a-dope here (the maneuver used by Mohammed Ali in the famous Rumble in the Jungle fight when he let George Forman box him against the ropes for various rounds until his rival was tired out enough to fall to a knockout punch). That was, in fact, the precise strategy Obama used over the summer and autumn - quietly fundraising and organizing but not turning on the charisma lights until the end - so as not to peak too early and to let the Clinton juggernaut veer and fall of its own weight.
But it will have to become Clinton’s strategy now because the campaign has no other good options available. The problem is that rope-a-dope is the tactic that a smaller opponent uses against a more powerful, lumbering adversary, not against a fast-moving, energetic one. And Obama won’t be tiring himself out either of money or enthusiasm before February 5. If anything, Obama’s fundraising will soar from the early victories while the Clinton camp will have difficulty expanding its money base beyond those that have already maxed out.
The prayer for Clinton – and Bill made this known yesterday when he blamed the media for not giving Obama what he thinks would be equal scrutiny – is that if Obama rockets out of New Hampshire and then takes South Carolina (and maybe even Nevada in between) that the press corps will then begin to pick at his record (despite the Clintonian claims that Obama has no experience, he does have 11 years as a legislator to sift through).
What the members of the Clinton camp hope is that, after what looks to be an Obama landslide coming on Tuesday, the press will declare him the clear frontrunner and then fight the Clintons’ battle for them. That’s pretty standard strategy: “hey, why don’t you go pick a fight with that guy over there.” The problem with it is that Obama’s novelty is not likely to wear off in four short weeks, he’ll get big bounces out of at least one of the next two states, and if the press goes picking around his life story, it’s likely to find many yet-to-be-told pearls even in the forgotten trash bins. In other words, what happens if the investigative reporters pick through the garbage looking for dirt and find bright, shiny objects instead?
We're on a totally new battlefield. But by Tuesday we may have to move from predicting mode to explaining mode.
Unless, of course, tonight's WMUR-ABC-Facebook debate radically changes the dynamic at hand. Republicans (McCain, Romney, Huckabee, Giuliani, Thompson and Paul) up at 7 p.m. ET, and Democrats (Obama, Clinton, Edwards and Richardson) at 8:45 p.m. ET. (I'm still investigating whether the debate will be aired online - neither ABC, Facebook, nor WMUR, nor C-Span have an online broadcast promoted on their web sites. If any reader knows, please add a comment, providing the link.)