Hollywood,
Meet Reality

Nobody knows anything. The old Hollywood saying (or, to be more precise, the old William Goldman saying from his book Adventures in the Screen Trade) would appear to apply only too uncomfortably to the world of presidential politics after Hillary Clinton’s upset victory in New Hampshire.

Not only did the polls predict an easy victory for Barack Obama – by double digits according to some surveys. Not only did the media convince itself that the superstar freshman senator from Illinois, fresh from his triumph in Iowa, was about to deal the coup de grace to the Clinton campaign in the Granite State. The candidates themselves allowed themselves to believe it, with reports abounding that the Hillary camp had privately conceded New Hampshire and was going into crisis mode over the primary timetable leading up to Super Duper Tuesday on February 5.

So what happened? Was everyone really so deaf, dumb and blind? Was the thing somehow rigged? Are New Hampshire voters just incurably fickle?

The answer, like many of these seeming conundrums, is actually pretty straightforward; it’s just that nobody had eyes to see it until the first returns came in shortly after 8 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday and overturned conventional wisdom.

In short, the polls weren’t wrong, so much as based on insufficient data in a fast-moving political environment that ultimately focused on Hillary, Hillary, Hillary in the crucial last 48 hours.

Anyone who scoured the fine print of the University of New Hampshire surveys sponsored by CNN could have seen it coming. Right up to the final weekend, which is when the last polls were conducted, almost half the New Hampshire electorate who declared an intention to vote in the Democratic primary were either completely undecided or soft in the level of support for their chosen candidate. To be precise: 25 percent said they were only leaning towards a candidate, and 20 percent they still hadn’t made up their minds.

In a primary election, where party loyalty isn’t an issue, where one candidate – Obama – is closing in fast on the long-time frontrunner and at least briefly surpassing her, where another election in another part of the country has created a big ripple, the possibility of deep volatility is keen and real.

Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, saw the possibility of an upset coming and said so in a commentary published last weekend. “The very short window between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary makes it almost impossible to do the kind of quality polling that professionals would like,” he wrote.

Contributors to Mark Blumenthal’s excellent site Mystery Pollster also understood that Obama’s high numbers were far from solid. Granted, the consensus in the online discussion boards was that high turnout would probably benefit Obama – a reasonable, if ultimately erroneous assumption – but that his margin of victory was likely to be two or three points, not 12 or 15.

So why did the mainstream media tell a very different story – that the Clinton campaign was finished, that the last-minute attacks and smears were simply symptoms of desperation, that Hillary’s fundraisers were deserting her as she dropped down to her last $15 million, that this election was now destined to be all Obama, all the time?

The answer, like the William Goldman adage, is all Hollywood. The networks and cable stations, and behind them the print media, were all in love with their own romantic story line – of the inspirational folk hero who seems to promise an end to partisan rancor and racial hatred, an end to the lies, dishonesty, rank ambition and hypocrisy of public life, an end to the divisions of the Clinton-Bush era and the promise of a brighter future.

That’s a great storyline, but it wasn’t the story unfolding in New Hampshire. As we now know, Obama did very, very well – way better than months of polling before the lead-up to Iowa would have led us to believe – but Clinton carried with her own share of idealism, the notion that this could be the best chance in a generation for a strong, widely respected woman to win the ultimate high political office.

The irony is that it was the very blindness of the media that probably played into the Clinton camp’s hands in the closing stages of the campaign. Repeatedly, the media pundits focused on Candidate Hillary – passionately defending her will to fight in the final debate, moistening up with tears at how hard the campaign has been on her – and assumed that she was on the verge of breaking down, both politically and perhaps also personally.

The effect was in fact the diametric opposite. Women voters – we know this because they have now talked about it – admired her for her emotional openness, something she had been lacking, and got the sense that she was being victimized by the punditocracy precisely because she was a woman. So she cried a little? Bad, said the television talking heads. Maybe not, thought the voters, and shifted their allegiances accordingly.

I write none of this as a defense of Hillary. Personally, I think her campaign has often been a repugnant exercise in grasping for power for its own sake. Her attacks on Obama, for everything from his idealism to the idle thoughts he formulated in kindergarten, have been cynical, manipulative and unpleasant. When Bill Clinton went on his rant decrying Obama’s insistence on having been against the Iraq war from the start as the “biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen”, he was himself spouting something very close to a bald-faced lie. (We can argue about the nuance, but his intent was clearly dishonest.)

This is not a good week for journalists to make predictions, but I suspect that these attacks will end up hurting the Clinton camp more than helping. But Bill and Hillary both are old hands at this game, and in their desperation to hang on in New Hampshire they went all-out for short-term gain. Bill’s rant was articulate to a fault and filled with the sort of passion that pleases voters because it makes them think at least some politicians are human beings after all.

It, along with Hillary’s own moments of high emotion, were enough to make the difference with many voters who would probably be just as happy with either a Clinton or an Obama presidency. David Moore, a New Hampshire-based veteran of the Gallup organization who has written several books on opinion polls, including the forthcoming The Opinion Makers: When Media Polls Undermine Democracy (Beacon Press), points out that this phenomenon is not without precedent.

In 1980, the polls had Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan neck and neck. It just happened that the final weekend before the election was the anniversary of the U.S. hostage-taking in Iran, and the television was filled with images of their capture and Carter’s ill-fated military adventure to rescue them. Reagan ended up winning handily.

“Polls always overstate degree of commitment voters have to their vote,” Moore told me. “The fact is, going into the election there were still many many people who were undecided. Those things about Hillary got tremendous play, and made the difference.”

Here is the irony: If the media had not insisted on its story that Hillary was doomed to defeat, she might very well have lost. The fact that they insisted is what saved her bacon. That’s an ironic twist worthy of Hollywood indeed.