As I was saying, Hillary Clinton is doomed – or possibly Barack Obama is. After Hillary’s victory in last night’s primary in New Hampshire, I think I may give up making predictions about American politics for 24 hours.
To be fair to the pundits and the pollsters, it wasn’t just journalists who were confidently predicting an Obama victory. Even people in the Hillary camp were talking about trying to keep the margin of their defeat in New Hampshire down to below double digits. When, on Monday, Hillary broke down and cried – or rather "choked up", it looked like she had accepted that defeat was inevitable.
New Hampshire lore is also that crying in public is very bad news for a candidate. It is what is deemed to have finished off Edmund Muskie in 1972. However, one of the Obama people did, presciently, say to me – "Hillary crying is bad news for us. It humanises her. It’s easier to run against a robot." Today’s conventional wisdom is that Hillary’s display of emotion did indeed help her, particularly among women voters.
A nasty thought also occurs to me. Did race come into it? I had an odd conversation at Boston airport with a woman, who was clearly both rich (she was checking into business class) and a Democrat. She said to me that the thing she didn’t like about Obama is "all that civil rights stuff". What civil rights stuff, I thought? Obama quotes Martin Luther King in his stump speech, but he can hardly be accused of playing the race card. The fact that Iowa – an overwhelmingly white state – could vote for Obama seemed to have put the race question to bed. But the Iowa caucuses take place in public. New Hampshire voters, cast their ballots in private.
Meanwhile, what of the Republicans? Well, the polls were right about McCain winning in New Hampshire. The pundits have now decided that Mitt Romney – who finished second – is finished. That suggests to me that he is now the clear favourite.
Actually, there is a serious case to be made for him. There have now been three Republican contests, and Romney is the only candidate to have placed first or second in all of them. (He won in Wyoming.) The next contest is in Michigan, where he has some strength because his father was governor there. Republican voters do not like McCain’s relatively liberal views on immigration, which Romney will definitely demonise. The Republican establishment does not like McCain because he is too much of a maverick. And Romney has loads of money behind him.
As Hillary Clinton has just shown, you write off the establisment candidate at your peril.
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