Hillary up against it in New Hampshire
Harold Wilson was right: a week really, really is a long time, as Hillary Clinton is finding out as she tries to keep out the cold in snowy New Hampshire, a state whose towns, too - Plymouth and Manchester - recall Old England and which Jon Snow on tonight's Channel 4 news called an American Lancashire. Though I'm not sure how well Jon knows Lancashire. This week may turn out to have been a turning point in the Presidential race, as the long time favourite for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, seems to have fallen behind the Illinois Senator Barack Obama - the latest polls showing him now clearly ahead. After his surprising, clear win in Iowa, I said I thought Hillary wasn't finished - but that she had to do the comeback lady thing today; and preferably inject some vision, some positive energy, into her campaign. Now, only a few days later, it looks as though that energy is draining ever more quickly from her, and towards the man people are increasingly comparing to John F. Kennedy.
Has she simply been too dour for the voters to warm to her? Hillary seems to have thought she could earn the right to be nominated by demonstrating experience, competence, and "readiness" for the Oval Office, and has taken a dull, heavy, wonkish approach to campaigning that's clearly contrasted markedly with Obama's tactics of sheer uplift. As Roger Simon has written at Politico about the two candidates' meeting in Nashua at the weekend,
Obama delivered a compelling, almost mesmerizing, speech, did not talk about any issue in detail and took no questions. His event lasted just over half an hour.
Clinton talked about issue after issue in almost mind-numbing detail and answered question after question in an event that lasted more than an hour and a half.
Both drew large crowds. But Clinton’s crowd was much smaller at the end of her speech than at the beginning.
And it's he, not she, who seems to have hit the note of the time, and attracted floating voters, as we call them in Britain, to his cause.
The British political junkie observing this is bound to compare these two with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. When fate created a vacancy for Labour leader in 1994, Blair's popular appeal and ability to make and ride a political wave helped him engulf his more serious, senior rival: in terms of policy there was little to choose between them, but in electoral terms, Blair had it all. Labour made the indisputably right choice, and the next thirteen years rubbed Gordon Brown's nose in it. He's inherited his crown in the end, yes - but within months of gaining office he looks, once again, like a man politically cursed.
Is a similar thing happening now in the States? The Democrats' time is coming, and they're in search of a leader. Now, at the moment of choice, having assumed for some time that their was an obvious nominee, they realise they have a more inspiring, more winning option, a man who may just have the political magic to reach out independents, new and non-voters, and even conservatives. They've realised they may have their own Tony Blair.
I still think Hillary's not out of it: even if she loses New Hampshire, at some point the Edwards vote will need to go elsewhere, and she can gain disproportionately from that - especially if she moves towards Edwards's populist, blue-collar rhetoric. But she is in real trouble now: if America is going idealistic, there'll simply be no stopping it.
Photograph: Daniella Zalcman under a Creative Commons licence.
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