Dover, New Hampshire
TWO DAYS AFTER the Iowa caucus, the Clinton campaign circulated an email asking “Where’s the bounce?” for Obama. It’s here. Obama hadn’t led a New Hampshire poll by more than 3 points since last January. For most of 2007, he was down by double digits. Now nearly every poll taken since January 4 has shown him opening up a sizable lead. The numbers for Clinton border on the macabre:
She’s down by double-digits in New Hampshire in most polls. Her national numbers, which gave her a 20+ point lead three weeks ago, show her nearly tied with Obama. She had a healthy lead in Nevada, too. But in the next 24 hours, Obama is set to receive the endorsement of one of the major casino employee unions. In South Carolina, Obama is already at +11.
The wheels are falling off the cart and yesterday the press in Dover were giddily proclaiming the race finished. The morning began with Clinton getting misty at a coffee shop while talking with a voter. And her afternoon appearance in a small gym connected to the Dover municipal complex wasn’t encouraging.
The fire marshal told me that capacity was 590; the place filled up about an hour before Clinton arrived. But that max-capacity is based on the size of the exit doors, not the room. So even with nearly 600 people there, it only felt about two-thirds full, mostly with older voters. When she took the stage, Clinton said there were 150 people outside who couldn’t get in.
The senator was introduced by Francine, a retired teacher, and converted Edwards voter, who had some very interesting things to say. For starters, she doesn’t “think that any party has all the answers,” which is big of her. Clearly, she’s gotten beyond the old politics of Us-versus-Them. But then she talked about one of the “other candidates” in the race.
“One of the other candidates has been compared to JFK,” she said, nervously. “And he was a wonderful leader, who gave us a lot of hope. But he was assassinated. And Lyndon Baines Johnson actually did all his work and got Republicans and Democrats to pass a lot of his measures.”
Was Francine saying that electing Obama could be sending him to his death? Or that Clinton is the new Lyndon Johnson? Or maybe was just saying that too much hope can be a bad thing after all. Who can tell. Francine was holding a bunch of papers, but I hoped she was working off of her own script.
Clinton followed Francine after a short delay and gave a numbing, low-energy talk. After 18 minutes, she opened the floor to questions.
When she illegal immigration came up (as it does at nearly every venue), she added one new wrinkle to her answer, clarifying that she is not in favor of giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, but that Obama is. About four people applauded.
When the global warming question came, Clinton pointed to having been successful at forcing the Pentagon to take climate change into account in their security assessments. She then went on to describe how climate change can be a security issue, claiming that the genocide in Darfur is “partly a result of global warming.”
Later, she talked about how dangerous a place the world is, citing Gordon Brown and the two U.K. terrorist attacks which followed his taking office. Clinton doesn’t think it was an accident that terrorists decided to “test” him just after he came to power. “I hope I don’t face any of those” types of tests, she said. “But if I do, I’ll be ready.”
Another questioner asked about Iran. Clinton said that “the United States cannot allow Iran to have a deliverable nuclear weapon.” But she added that she thinks they are still some years away from that and that she would bide her time and engage the Iranians because “something good might happen, you never know.”
Forty minutes into her Q&A, I realized that people had been quietly filing out the side doors. Perhaps 15 percent of the crowd was gone.
It wasn’t really a rally, so much as a deathwatch.
Jonathan V. Last is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
