To slow the Obama steamroller, Clinton opted to appeal to New Hampshire's main street
globeandmail.com
January 10, 2008
John Ibbitson
MANCHESTER, N.H. — At one of Hillary Clinton's town hall meetings in New Hampshire on Monday, two men suddenly held up signs saying "Iron my shirt." They shouted the slogan while police led them away.
"Can we turn the lights on? It's awfully dark," the New York senator responded, to applause, using the incident to remind the crowd that "as I think has been abundantly demonstrated, I am also running to break through the highest and hardest glass ceiling."
For Scotty Greenwood, a consultant and prominent Clinton supporter, that moment was defining, because it reminded women in New Hampshire of what was at stake and what the Clinton candidacy meant for them.
"Communications in New Hampshire are viral," she explained yesterday. "People don't listen to the national media. They don't need to. They assess each candidate personally, talk with each other, and make up their minds."
The iron-my-shirt incident received almost no press. But Ms. Greenwood is convinced it moved votes.
Hillary Clinton's amazing come-from-behind victory here Tuesday confounded prognosticators and embarrassed pollsters.
It also vindicated the decision by Ms. Clinton and her advisers to throw out their playbook after her defeat in Iowa, to broaden the pitch to women and to concentrate on retail politics.
Hindsight is the ultimate analyst. And hindsight knew it would work all along.
Way back last summer, Clinton strategists debated among themselves whether to contest Iowa, whose caucuses are dominated by activists, and where the Democratic base is to the left of the national base.
But with their enormous lead in the polls, it seemed safer for the Clinton machine to go into Iowa than to stay out. That may have been a mistake. It was certainly a mistake to appeal heavily to older women by presenting Ms. Clinton as the candidate who could finally make their dreams of seeing one of their own in the White House come true.
While the appeal worked in that constituency, it left younger women gravitating to Mr. Obama as the candidate of generational change. That, combined with Mr. Obama's great success in mobilizing young, independent voters, contributed to his win.
With only five days to reverse the Obama phenomenon, and faced with polls showing a surge of support building for Mr. Obama in New Hampshire, Ms. Clinton decided to get tough and to go retail. While in Iowa she had often concentrated on giving speeches in front of crowds, in New Hampshire she focused on question-and-answer sessions in smaller gatherings.
In that respect, the multitudes that swamped Mr. Obama's events might in retrospect have worked against him. His rousing speeches looked great on television, but he wasn't engaging individual voters, while Ms. Clinton was tearing up in a restaurant as she described her personal, passionate commitment to becoming the first woman president.
Ms. Clinton also broadened her pitch to women, bringing daughter Chelsea to events and surrounding herself with youthful supporters.
And she began taking on Mr. Obama's record and Mr. Obama himself. In Saturday's all-candidates' debate, she confronted him repeatedly on the paucity of his legislative record, emphasizing her own accomplishments as first lady and senator. And she warned viewers that fine words don't always translate into substantive change.
In the final hours of the campaign, it all gelled. Female voters, who had split more or less evenly between Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton in Iowa, shifted emphatically to Ms. Clinton in New Hampshire. She took almost half their votes; Mr. Obama took only a third.
He continued to have strong support among independent voters, but many of them decided to give John McCain a boost and voted on the Republican side instead. Ms. Clinton also solidly won among registered Democrats, the base of the party. And among the one-in-five Democratic voters who listed experience as the most important issue for them, Ms. Clinton took practically every vote.
Terry McAuliffe, Ms. Clinton's campaign manager, predicted that the Clinton campaign will focus even more strongly in presenting the human, personal side of the candidate in future contests.
"I've known the woman for almost 27 years," he told an interviewer yesterday on MSNBC. "She's a very special person, a great mother, she cares about the issues and you saw that in that diner."
But the dynamic of the Democratic race is about to change. The next three contested Democratic primaries and caucuses are in Nevada, South Carolina and Florida.
The West and the South start to have their say. Latinos and African-Americans weigh in. Air wars matter - television ads trump town halls in Las Vegas and Miami. And it may be a challenge for Ms. Clinton to once again emphasize her human, maternal side in environments that lack the intimacy of New Hampshire restaurants.
Regardless, if the future is anything like the recent past in this race, the only constant will be surprise.
***