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January092008

Brave, Lonely Dissents Are the Best Kind

Filed under: The Squib Report   Tagged: , , , , , ,

I admit it. I'm an Obama man. I was psyched after Iowa, and I was dejected upon hearing the news of Hillary Clinton's victory this morning (wrong time zone for prime time results). Several hours later, I see the positive side of Clinton's comeback, and I find myself looking forward to the spirited few weeks of political combat to come.

Not many people saw Clinton's strong showing yesterday coming, but I did want to salute Hendrik Hertzberg for being one of the very few people to get at least a small part of the story dead right, a mere day after the Iowa result, when the Obamania was at its freshest and most difficult to contravene.

I confess that when I listened to the last installment of the delightful New Yorker podcast "The Campaign Trail"—which usually features The New Yorker's Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza, and executive editor, Dorothy Wickenden (they make a very good team), but the day after Iowa also included Hertzberg, the magazine's chief political commentator—I made a dismissive clucking sound with my tongue upon hearing Hertzberg's negative assessment of Obama's prepared caucus-night speech and praise for Clinton's "gracious" concession. Just as we learned not to be overhasty about writing any candidate off, we likewise shouldn't read too much into what was likely a small part of Clinton's comeback.

But the fact remains, that Hertzberg, both in the podcast and on his blog, may have foreseen Obama's tendency to turn his movement into a hazy abstraction and Clinton's newfound need to hunker down and show her more affable side. It's already difficult to reconstruct how heretical that take seemed on Friday, and Hertzberg deserves credit for not letting the prevailing winds buffet him about.

I hope Hertzberg participates in the next podcast so he can crow over his prescience! (Which he surely won't.)
—Martin Schneider

Update: I think Karl Rove might be a "Campaign Trail" podcast enthusiast. After Hillary won, his surprisingly trite (and, less surprisingly, racially coded) article in The Wall Street Journal made a similar observation:
And Mr. Obama, in his own way, is often as calculating as Mrs. Clinton. For example, he was the only candidate, Democratic or Republican, to use a teleprompter to deliver his Iowa and New Hampshire election-night speeches. It gave his speeches a quality and clarity that other candidates, speaking from notes or the heart, failed to achieve. But what he gained in polish, he lost in connection.

—MCS

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