What's Next: If Clinton wins tonight, the race resets--presumably as a two-person contest between her and Obama. Expect headlines to include the phrase "Comeback Gal"; pundits will likely point to yesterday's humanizing tears as an explanation.
But if she stumbles--the more likely outcome--it promises to become one of the longest, strangest trips in modern Democratic primary history. After losing New Hampshire, Clinton probably won't win Nevada, where Obama is set to receive the all-important Culinary Workers union endorsement tomorrow, or South Carolina, where blacks now heavily favor the Illinois senator. But it's clear that the former First Lady will continue to campaign--if not, as her spokesman Howard Wolfson claims, "until the convention," then at least through Feb. 5, when 21 delegate-rich states cast their ballots. Many of them, including New York and New Jersey, would likely favor Clinton; others, like California, would probably be up for grabs. "We have the resources and operation to compete across the nation," Wolfson has said. "This is a contest for delegates."
It might sound outlandish--we're used to wham-bam nominating contests at this point--but it's not unprecedented. In fact, Clinton has already experienced slow-burn primary success. In 1992, her husband lost Iowa, New Hampshire and South Dakota before winning Georgia and sweeping on Super Tuesday. That said, 2008 is no 1992, and Hillary is no Bill. Iowa was irrelevant that year because the winner, Tom Harkin, was a Hawkeye State senator. While Bill's second-place finish in New Hampshire was a surprise, Hillary's would be a disappointment. And there was no rival frontrunner to brake the former president's post-Granite State momentum.
That's Clinton's unique challenge going forward: how to topple a single, well-funded candidate with two (or three, or four) come-from-behind wins in each of the earliest states. A close look at her strategy over the past five days offers some clues. First, expect her to keep emphasizing the differences between "talk and action, rhetoric and reality." "You have to decide what this election is about," Bill told voters in Amherst, N.H. on Saturday. "Do you want the feeling of change or the fact of change?" Hillary said much the same the thing the next day in Hampton (they reportedly co-wrote her new stump speech). Second, expect a shakeup. Democratic big-wigs will expect some acknowledgment of failure, and the Clinton camp is reportedly preparing an infusion of new--or old--blood (rumored names included Paul Begala, James Carville and Maggie Williams--all old Clinton hands). Finally, expect amplified attacks on Obama. Hillary has spent the week stressing the "hypocrisies" that make him, in her view, little more than an ordinary politician with extraordinary speechwriters--"that Obama’s New Hampshire co-chair was a drug-company lobbyist; that
the senator had vehemently opposed the Iraq war but then voted
repeatedly to fund it; that he had said he wanted to scrap the Patriot
Act and start over, but then voted for it," as my colleague Howard Fineman
writes. There's more where that came from.
Sure, none of these barbs has stuck in the short span between Iowa and New Hampshire. But now Clinton has a month. If she can convince voters that Obama is unacceptable, the thinking goes, they will return to a safer candidate--and when the dust clears on Feb. 5, a woman will be the last man standing.
