A second place finish makes him viable in New Hampshire.
I'm from the New England area. Those people do not like to be told who is still a viable candidate, and New Hampshire is tiny.
Edwards has to do one thing in the next few days. He has to hold big rallies in New Hampshire. If he can't energize the crowd there, he's done.
Perception is key now because Hillary is no longer considered automatic. This may toss the race into chaos.
I don't see him winning NH.
Edwards's coverage has been moderately positive, surprisingly, but Clinton is getting destroyed by the crosstabs on these exit polls and what they say about the race. As it turns out, she lost the female vote to Obama. Again, the young people showed up. And the election didn't involve independents and soft Republicans to nearly the extent the press expected (although he won with them as well). In other words, Obama beat her among Democrats and women, and then pulled out the bigger margin with young people.
TBG may be right. Obama and Edwards may have done permanent damage to her tonight. An Obama win was bad enough, but coming in behind Edwards made this the worst-case scenario for the Clintons. To say nothing of the fact that Obama and Edwards people still looked fired up and their candidates on message. Clinton looked tired and stressed, and her audience was clearly hurting. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
Edwards would have needed to win by a solid margin in at least three early states to reach the same unstoppability.
Clinton is burnt toast and chicken feathers. No one under the age of 120 seems to like her. She's got the old vote, but Obama seems to have captivated the gullible enthusiastic Yoof vote with his Blair-ish smile, and that means a chunk of Clinton's natural constituency has gone. So she has no real foundation now.
I also think an Obama presidency will turn into a disaster for the Democrats, and people who vote for him are going to be massively disappointed and angry by how little he does for them. He's going to be carrying the blame for a huge drop in living standards and foreign policy reverses, and I don't see that he has either the character or the vision to handle them confidently or effectively. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Right engineering a humiliation of the sort they arranged for Carter - it depends how far he's willing to sell out for 'hope'.
So the chances of an R comeback for 2012 - Jeb Bush is the inevitable front runner - are that much higher now.
In my mind, he's mixed up about politics. He thinks political unity is what we want. He doesn't seem to understand that true unity means that sentiment should be felt among the people, not the politicians.
Unity could be much better couched in, for instance, a plan for universal health care where all Americans are united in the same system. Now that's unity.
Where does Obama's unity get us? I mean, these last two years, Americans have been unified in gridlock.
Clinton is burnt toast and chicken feathers. No one under the age of 120 seems to like her.
So she's essentially campaigning for the McCain vote. (Not the McCain supporters' vote. Just the McCain vote.) Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
And I say again: One of them has a tendency to get decisions -- big decisions, more importantly -- right the first time (like Gore and Dean), while the other has spent quite a long time apologizing for his votes. The fact that so many buy into Edwards 2.0 without any skepticism is a little weird to me having lived through the first installment (the one that helped take down Howard Dean, the only candidate who could've possibly defeated Bush), since it does seem a bit Romney-ish at times. I got behind Edwards partly because he put people I really like, and who are competent, around him. And I have to confess that I do love his story, because, while we're not hyper-rich like they are, the Edwards family story is a lot like the Jones family story. But I'm not working with the assumption that Edwards, who's gone from hawk to dove and moderate to populist as these positions have become politically convenient, is incredibly real. (I was born at night, but it wasn't last night, John.)
And I love Elizabeth Edwards, who would probably make a better president than anybody in the field, but everyone loves her.
The only difference I really see is in their rhetoric/style (basically Jack vs Bobby Kennedy), and I don't think that will prove to be a big deal. Obama's more politically savvy than many give him credit for, and one potential advantage I see in him is his ability to sell more progressive policies in post-partisan language.
I know Edwards is the populist in the race, but I think it's a bit unfair to see Obama as some sort of elitist with no grassroots/"real people" ties given his background in civil rights law and community organizing. Of the two, I think Obama clearly wins on that count, although Edwards's law background is solid, too.
I think there are two real groups in opposition to Obama in the Dem base: The We-Paid-Our-Dues crowd behind Hillary, and the Obamanites-Are-Silly-and-Naive/Don't-Buy-the-Hype crowd behind Edwards. The former doesn't convince me at all, since paying one's dues and getting the nomination is a (laughably conformist) Republican thing. The latter may be right. It's certainly possible, but I also think it's entirely possible the charge is as valid when said of Edwards. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
