One thing we’ve learned about Hillary Clinton, her husband, and the entire Clinton campaign team is that they’re sore losers. Not that anyone should be surprised by this. But how you respond to a defeat is a test of a presidential candidate. Respond poorly and you suffer. Nobody likes a sore loser. The night Hillary Clinton lost in Iowa, she was all smiles. In fact, everyone on the stage at the Hillary post-caucus party in Des Moines was smiling. It was weird. You’d have thought Hillary had actually won. Eerie as this was, it was better than what has come later – namely anger and recriminations. First came the belittling of Iowa. A Clinton apparatchik was quoted as downgrading the caucuses as no more important than a mayor’s race. Once safely in New Hampshire, Clinton noted that people who work in night jobs or who might be out-of-state on Election Day could vote in the New Hampshire primary. Oh, how nice to be away from those unfair caucuses in Iowa! Worse than Iowa and even more unfair to Hillary is the press. It’s let Obama off the hook from the beginning of the campaign right through Iowa – all the while pounding mercilessly on Hillary. When I ran into a Clinton campaign staffer at the Manchester Starbucks, his first question was, “When is the press going to get tough with Obama?” Okay, the Clintons have a point on the media coverage. The relationship between Barack Obama and the press is still at the honeymoon stage. And it may not advance beyond that any time soon. But is that the chief cause of Hillary’s decline? I don’t think so. And blaming the press only makes Clinton resemble the politician she’s recently been likened to – Richard Nixon. There’s another culprit in the downward drift of the Clinton candidacy. It’s the voters. Blaming the voters was implicit in Clinton’s tearful claim that the campaign has been hard for her and that she cares so much for the country – more than Obama, she suggested, not too subtly. What’s the matter with voters? Don’t they understand this? She really cares and she’s ready. After New Hampshire, should we expect more of this whining and blaming? Maybe candidate Clinton has learned that being a gracious loser is more attractive. But I doubt it.
