(Crossposted from The Field.)
A year ago yesterday, noting the fast post-Iowa collapse of what had been Senator Clinton's commanding lead in national polls until then, I posted that image, above, to The Field.
For a year prior, Clinton had led Obama and the others in all national polls by 15 to 20 points more or less. But then on January 3, Obama won the Iowa caucuses, and many who thought his candidacy a lark full of hopey illusion began to see it as hard nosed and viable. The national numbers snapshot on January 7 suddenly told a new narrative:
Clinton 33 percent (-8 since Iowa)
Obama 29 (+5)
Edwards 20 (+3)
Clinton's third place showing in Iowa had blown the gasket on the "inevitable nominee" argument being pushed (most loudly by her top strategist Mark Penn) and her public image had become an icy caricature frozen by her own handlers' insistence on packaging her as the candidate of "experience" and toughness, until on January 7...
Then on the afternoon of January 7, Clinton's back against the wall and with rampant speculation that New Hampshire would knock her right out of the presidential race, came her breakthrough: an emotive moment when, fighting back tears, the human side of Hillary Clinton emerged in time for the evening news on primary eve and dominated the news cycle as New Hampshire went to the polls.
That afternoon, I wrote that, "I found her teary-eyed moment today humanizing," but so many others were jumping all over her for it. And yet the harder they jumped and gloated over it, the more nasty their response, the more sympathy and empathy it generated for Clinton.
(The only other story to break through in that cycle was that of an angry mob of Ron Paul supporters chasing Sean Hannity of Fox News through the snowy streets of Manchester, which was gratifying to watch.)
At midnight, the northern New Hampshire towns of Dixville Notch and Hart's Location voted and more interesting than Obama's victory in both towns - and a harbinger of a November yet to arrive - was that for the first time ever in Dixville Notch, more locals took Democratic ballots than Republican ones.
Almost every pundit, reading the polling trends, thought that Obama would win New Hampshire a year ago today. The shift in the national polls was reflected locally.
The final Pollster.com average prior to the vote had Obama with 36.7 percent, Clinton with 30 and Edwards with 18.4. And Obama did in the end receive about that - 37 percent, and Edwards got 17. But the story of the night was that Clinton sopped up virtually all the undecided vote, topped the others with 39 percent, and was suddenly back in the game, big time, after her Iowa stumble.
Clinton's victory speech came first that night:
She said:
I come tonight with a very, very full heart.
And I want especially to thank New Hampshire. Over the last week, I listened to you and, in the process, I found my own voice...
Clinton the human was suddenly a new character on the national political stage. Times had changed since Senator Edmund Muskie's 1972 tears (some say it was just melted snow on his face) in New Hampshire wrecked his presidential ambitions. And the New Hampshire electorate served up the lesson that things can happen in the final 24 hours of a campaign to change the outcome.
The pressure was now on Obama. How could he possibly retake the initiative after the New Hampshire primary shocker? That same January 8 night, he took the stage in Nashua:
And with three words - "yes, we can," introduced for the first time as a call and response line in his speeches - Obama parlayed his defeat into a victory. In temperament, with confidence and calm - and with the assist of a raucous crowd that was determined not to let the setback get it down - he kept himself in the game.
I surmise that one of the factors at play, watching these two speeches a year later, is that Obama's staff did not have a concession speech written and Clinton's did not have a victory speech authored, that both camps were genuinely caught flat-footed by New Hampshire's voters. So each added some words to tailor the speeches to the moment, but Obama's speech came off sounding the most victorious and forward looking. (And there's an ironic history in that: In 1992, in New Hampshire, it was Bill Clinton who parlayed his second place finish, a loss to Paul Tsongas, into a perceived victory with the entrance of the term "comeback kid" into the American political lexicon. Obama had taken a page from Bubba and made it his this night.):
I want to congratulate Senator Clinton on a hard-fought victory here in New Hampshire.
A few weeks ago, no one imagined that we'd have accomplished what we did here tonight. For most of this campaign, we were far behind, and we always knew our climb would be steep. But in record numbers, you came out and spoke up for change. And with your voices and your votes, you made it clear that at this moment - in this election - there is something happening in America...
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks to come.
We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.
But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told that we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.
Yes we can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.
Yes we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights.
Yes we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.
Yes we can.
It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.
Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can.
And so tomorrow, as we take this campaign South and West; as we learn that the struggles of the textile worker in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas; that the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in America's story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea - Yes. We. Can.
The moment was not merely feel-good, but had tangible results that would shape the rest of the campaign due to the money it raised online from small donations by his grassroots supporters. When the January 2008 fundraising reports came in later, the NY Times reported:
After Mr. Obama's victory in Iowa, the campaign collected $2.8 million online. But it was the two days after Mr. Obama's stunning loss to Mrs. Clinton in New Hampshire that campaign officials point to as when they began to realize they were in for an extraordinary month.
On the evening of the primary, Mr. Obama's finance staff settled in to watch the results from their cubicles. When the television networks called the race for Mrs. Clinton, their spirits sagged. But Ms. Burdick was staring at her laptop, watching a graph showing how much money was coming into the Obama campaign over the Internet. Within minutes, it was shooting upward.
"This is crazy," Ms. Burdick said, calling over to two of her colleagues sitting near her.
Within three hours, the campaign had cleared $500,000. In the morning, when Ms. Burdick checked again, the campaign had raised $750,000. Over the course of two days, Mr. Obama collected $4.4 million online.
Obama's January fundraising take added up to a whopping $36 million, compared to Clinton's $13.5 million.
And it was the defeat in New Hampshire - the candidate, under intense public spotlight during an obvious setback - that paradoxically caused his grassroots base to rally financially behind him on a scale never seen before in American politics.
That moment was the beginning of an important lesson for the US left and its Chicken Little tendencies to think that any adversity or setback or stumble means the sky is going to fall and all will be terrible and ruined always and forever. The "Chicken Little" tendencies and the rising counter-meme dominated much of the spring and summer and even fall among Obama supporters. (And there is still, evidently, some difficulty in some corners accepting the reality of winning, a difficulty that manifests in the droop-eyed insistences that nothing can or will ever change, or that Obama has "sold us out" before he is even inaugurated: really, this is something for the psychologists to study.)
But for me, it was that night, a year ago today, that provided the lesson - never let a setback wreck our spirits, and never presume it's as bad as your opponents tell you it is - and gave the opening for a "teaching moment" about the contagion that is panic and the antidote that is hope.
There will be continued "teaching moments" to come, starting less than two weeks from today, when "yes we can" becomes, also, "yes, we did."