Reality upended expectations in 2008

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

WASHINGTON - Back at the very beginning, we thought we knew how it would end.

With so many primaries and caucuses compressed in the first few weeks of 2008, the frontrunner would quickly clinch the nomination. The Democratic contest would be over right after the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, or surely right after the New Hampshire primary five days later.

In the months leading up to the primaries, many expected Sen. Hillary Clinton to raise so much money that no other Democratic contender could threaten her "coronation," as pundits then liked to call it.

In an October 2006 Gallup survey, nearly four out of five Democrats were convinced that Clinton would be their nominee.

On the other side, the consensus thinking was that the Republican presidential hopefuls might have to fight it out long into 2008.

The expectations were the party would split between centrists, such as former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, and social conservatives, such as Virginia Sen. George Allen (remember when he was a presidential contender?).

But the 2008 campaign proved to be a series of explosions, as bits of conventional wisdom were blown to smithereens.

When so many columnists, pollsters and strategists are wrong, it is easy to confess error.

I was wrong, for instance, when on the eve of the New Hampshire primary I wrote a story assuming that Clinton, who’d just been beaten in Iowa, would lose in New Hampshire.

I figured that it would be a John Edwards-Barack Obama race from then on.

Clinton confounds the polls
I was not the only one who got it wrong.

Confounding the pollsters, Clinton won New Hampshire.

In 2008, the conventional wisdom has been upset again and again by independent-minded voters, faulty polling, unexamined premises, and arcane rules.

Foremost among the arcane: the superdelegates.

A wave of puzzlement and fear swept through some grassroots Democrats when they belatedly read the party rules and realized that elected Democratic officials — governors, senators, members of the House, elected state party activists — would account for nearly 40 percent of the number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination.

Would the superdelegates reverse the will of the primary voters, as some Obama fans feared?

In the end, no. Most superdelegates appear to be taking the politically safe course and simply following election returns rather than undoing them.

But what about the money race?

One of the unexamined premises was Clinton’s supposed fundraising advantage. By the fall of 2007, she had raised more than $73 million, to Obama’s $57 million. Who’d have thought that all of her money would not suffice?

Another premise was that Clinton’s campaign team, with decades of experience, would know every twist in the road, and would know how to exploit Obama’s weaknesses.

And yet they didn't.

Clinton team's miscalculation
The conventional wisdom said the Clinton strategists were the smartest political veterans — a campaign dream team. Or were they?

Time magazine’s Karen Tumulty reported that at a planning session last year Clinton strategist Mark Penn predicted that a victory in the March 5 California primary would put her over the top because she’d collect all the state's 370 delegates.

But Democrats award their delegates proportionally, rather than on a winner-take-all basis, as Republicans do in some states.

Penn's apparent error reveals that even the seasoned pros were sometimes clueless about the rules in this unusual campaign cycle.

Video Bill Clinton assesses Iowa Dec. 15, 2007: Speaking about his wife's campaign, ex-president Bill Clinton says he "never thought she had a big lead in Iowa," but that she "might win there." MSNBC

One of Penn’s colleagues pointed his error out to him, but Tumulty reports that the Clinton strategy “remained the same, with the campaign making its bet on big-state victories.”

She did win California, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey. But it appears that won’t be enough.

In retrospect, there were worrisome signs for Clinton as early as June of 2006, before she formally entered the race.

I went to Iowa and New Hampshire to listen to the early murmuring of Democratic activists. I headlined my story: Some rank-and-file Democrats fear Clinton bid.

I heard from Democrats such as Jan Sutherland, a Council Bluffs, Iowa retiree and part-time teacher of English as a second language, who told me, “There are too many people who dislike Hillary. It’s not that Hillary can’t handle the job, they just simply dislike Hillary and they’d vote against her personally.”

Mark Warner for president?
Remember when Warner was an intruiging Democratic prospect for 2008?

Or Joe Biden of Delaware?

How about Wisconsin's Russ Feingold?

In early to mid-2006, Democrats were eyeing all sort of alternatives.

Yet by the end of the year, it was clear that Obama was the phenomenon. But was he a candidate?

I saw hundreds of fans crowding into an auditorium in Rochester, Minn. to see him, thrusting at him copies of Time magazine with the Senator's photo on the cover for him to autograph. He was there to campaign for Senate candidate Amy Klobuchar, not for himself, but one couldn't tell the difference.

And you never saw such frenzied devotion at Biden or Warner events.

Who would have thought that Obama’s rivals would use the inexperience argument against him again and again with so little apparent effect, at least up to this point?

Bill Clinton raised the inexperience issue in late 2007.

“When is the last time we elected a president based on one year of service in the Senate before he started running?” the ex-president wondered, in an interview with PBS talk show host Charlie Rose in December 2007. The former president asked whether voters were “prepared to roll the dice” on Obama.

The nonchalant Obama shrugged off such criticism with disdain.

“I understand there’s a history of politics being all about slash and burn,” he told reporters the day after the Clinton interview aired. “I recall what the Clintons themselves called the ‘politics of personal destruction’ — which they decried. My suspicion is that that’s just not where the country is at right now. They are not interested in politics as a blood sport; they’re interested in governance and solving problems.”

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