Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Commenter Brian makes an observation "No one is talking about how the polls actually nailed Obama's number. Obama didn't lose this election. He stayed steady and Hillary surged ahead." That seems to be true. Here's a chart comparing the actual results to the most recent Pollster.com current standard estimate polling average.

Just as Brian says, the difference between the Obama poll level and the Obama vote total level seems to just be your basic statistical variance. The pollsters underestimated Clinton's level of support. People who were undecided as of the last round of polling seem to have gone overwhelmingly in her direction.

-- MATTHEW YGELSIAS

I’ve seen some arguments that Hillary Clinton's victory in New Hampshire isn't that surprising. Polls showed her with enormous leads in the state throughout 2007 — and as far back as 2006. That she managed to beat Barack Obama by five points will help get her campaign back on track, but to characterize this as some kind of miraculous "comeback" is a bit of a stretch. She won where she was supposed to win.

-- STEVE BENEN

Harry Truman is probably still safe in the rankings as America’s most renowned comeback kid – his brandishing of that Dewey Beats Truman headline is iconic – but Hillary Clinton has now shocked just about everybody. Not merely the pollsters, and “the media, but also, reportedly, the tea-leaf readers in her own campaign who had foreseen disaster in their internal polling of the New Hampshire electorate.

Hillary this morning may well be thinking: Is this a great country, or what? In the land of opportunity, she just transformed herself from a downbeat blues singer ("Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out") to Rocky.

-- DICK POLMAN

Part of me is crushed. But part of me is happy to see two candidates forced to battle it out in a long slog. We find out more that way. They grow more. More people get a say. That's a good thing. And I should say that although I remain a passionate Obama supporter among the Democrats, I also feel little compunction in recognizing that Clinton did have something of a personal breakthrough in the last few days. The brittle exterior cracked. What was beneath is more human and less calculated. She was forced to explain from the heart why she really wants to win. People responded. As they would.

I have no doubt that Obama is the better candidate, for America and the world. And I believe after this very close race, he will go on to Nevada and South Carolina stronger for not winning in a wave of euphoria. Nothing worth winning comes easily. But Clinton is learning from Obama as he has from her. And both are growing as a result. This is a good thing.

-- ANDREW SULLIVAN

Every four years, it seems, Democrats try to transform someone into a Kennedy, almost always with disappointing results.

-- MATT BAI

Democrats will surely nominate a senator, and if John McCain can't go all the way, Republicans will name a former governor or super-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who insists that a president needs executive experience to run the Executive branch.

History suggests otherwise. In 1960, Richard Nixon used that argument against John F. Kennedy and, in the early months of JFK's Administration, it looked like Nixon might have had a point as the new President mishandled the Bay of Pigs disaster.

But Kennedy trumped his inexperience with two crucial qualities: He took responsibility for his mistakes and learned from them, in contrast to George W. Bush, whose resume as an executive did not help him do either, and Nixon who . . . But you know the rest of that story.

-- ROBERT STEIN

Bush's failed presidency has left the Republicans scrambling to reconstitute the Reagan coalition. The wide range of different candidates-- from Giuliani to Romney to McCain to Huckabee to Paul-- offer different solutions. We don't yet know how the coalition will be reassembled, and under whose leadership. However . . . it looks like putting it back together will be a tall order. And although the eventual nominee will try to assume the mantle of Ronald Reagan-- and, equally important, not the mantle of George W. Bush-- the Republican party will have been changed forever by the events of the last eight years.

. . . And that is why, if, like many Americans, you think that change is coming, and you think that this is a good thing, you should tip your hat to George W. Bush and his eventful presidency. For if Ronald Reagan was the Great Communicator, George W. Bush is the Great Destroyer of Coalitions.

-- JACK BALKIN

The amazing rebound of Hillary Clinton may have a beneficial effect on Republican fortunes. Instead of facing an inexperienced but inspirational opponent in the general election, it now appears that the GOP nominee will have to fight the Clintons and their political machine. And that could make a big difference in party turnout and cohesion in November.

-- ED MORRISSEY

Huckabee is a real Southerner, in that he was born and raised there, while Bush was a transplanted Texan, and Huckabee came from a lower-middle class family and Bush came from wealthy American political aristocracy. To the extent that Huckabee represents anything threatening or different, it is in his biography and geography, if you will.

Republicans have never given the reins to a real, born-and-bred Southerner. If Northeasterners are already freaking out about the risk of the GOP becoming a regional, Southern party, you can just imagine the terrible thoughts that run through their head when they consider the consequences of a Huckabee nomination.

-- DANIEL LARISON

Say what you will about Hillary Clinton (and don’t get me started on her negatives) but no one can deny that she is very smart, very committed, and very knowledgeable about the workings of government. She, even more than her husband, is something of a policy wonk, finding pleasure in detail and nuance of an issue.

Then along comes this upstart, this interloper Obama whose platitudes about "change" and "hope" are sweeping people off their feet like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. The people have responded to this likable, non-threatening black man with an enthusiasm not seen since the 1960 campaign and the Kennedy "jumpers" – so-called by JFK aide Kenny O’Donnell who would play a game with other campaign aides in motorcades counting the number of people who were literally jumping up and down in excitement when the candidate passed.

You see that same kind of enthusiasm for Obama. . . . But has anyone bothered to ask why? Certainly not the press – yet. Eventually, even the media is going to catch on to the fact that Obama’s campaign is the equivalent of cotton candy; light on facts, fluffy on details, mostly made up of thin air but tastes rather good.

-- RICK MORAN

Obama can be seen in any number of ways exactly because he is so vacuous and content-less. He is the presidential candidate version of abstract art, spouting platitudes about "the future" and "hope" that would have the New York Times set laughing up their sleeves if they had come from the mouth of George Bush.

-- THE ICONIC MIDWESTERNER

Obama emphasizes the connections between people, the networks and the webs of influence. These sorts of links are invisible to some of his rivals, but Obama is a communitarian. He believes you can only make profound political changes if you first change the spirit of the community. In his speeches, he says that if one person stands up, then another will stand up and another and another and you’ll get a nation standing up.

The key word in any Obama speech is "you." Other politicians talk about what they will do if elected. Obama talks about what you can do if you join together. Like a community organizer on a national scale, he is trying to move people beyond their cynicism, make them believe in themselves, mobilize their common energies.

His weakness is that he never breaks from his own group. In policy terms, he is an orthodox liberal. He never tells audiences anything that might make them uncomfortable. In the Senate, he didn’t join the Gang of 14, which created a bipartisan consensus on judges, because it would have meant deviating from liberal orthodoxy and coming to the center.

How do you build a trans-partisan coalition when every single policy you propose is reliably on the left?

-- DAVID BROOKS

Don't worry about my eyesight. I have more vision than the president of the United States.

-- TED SORENSON