2016 Postmortem
Showing Original Post only (View all)Sanders Beats Clinton 49-49: The Real Story Behind the Iowa Numbers [View all]
Hillary Clintons razor-thin margin was actually a defeat of a well-financed, highly organized, experienced Clinton campaign, and the Democrats ought to be worried about it.
In 1968 the Harvard Crimson ran the poignant headline Harvard Beats Yale 29-29! Yale and Harvard were undefeated going into their matchup that year, with Yale a heavy favorite. As expected, Yale got out to an early 22-point lead. But in the last few minutes, Harvard scored 16 unanswered points and bested (tied) the prohibitive favorite. The event and the pithy headline are indelibly etched in history.
Much like football, politics is a tough business. Presidential politics, in particular, is a highly demanding, high-stakes endeavor. So, watching Hillary Clinton lose to Bernie Sanders in the Iowa caucus was indeed both a hard thing to observe, but it was also just a part of the game. The only harder thing to watch this political season has been the slowly engulfing irrelevance of Jeb Bush (but more on what his fate tells us about the current political season a bit later).
Some of you will no doubt insist that Clinton got 49.9 percent of the Iowa vote and Sanders got only 49.6 percent of the vote, making the former secretary of state, in some numbingly technical sense, the winner. She lost. Lets be clear.
Clinton is one of the most prominent figures in Democratic Party politics in the last two decades. She is the wife of a popular two-term ex-president, a former New York senator and a former secretary of state. She is supremely well financed and possessed of unparalleled networks in politics, media and business; she also boasts an enormous number of endorsements. She is as skilled and experienced as anyone on the presidential campaign trail could be. As such, plain and simple, Hillary Clinton should have performed like the prohibitive favorite she is supposed to be.
But that is not what happened. She effectively lost to a 74-year-old Vermont senator with no prior national profile; who had openly declared himself a socialist; who had no super PAC funding or Wall Street money behind him; and who couldnt call on a veritable Maginot Line of endorsements and cronies and ambitious toadies to grease his path.
http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2016/02/sanders_beats_clinton_49_49_the_real_story_behind_the_iowa_numbers.html?wpisrc=topstories