Let the Second-Guessing Begin!

Of course, Obama himself is cool. He just is. Detractors can belittle this, but it helps in politics, which has always been partly about style and sex appeal. He also showed that he could take a punch and stay calm, essential for a rookie. Had he lost his cool even once, he would have been toast.

Candor Obama has not been particularly accessible to the media. For a candidate who stressed transparency, he could use more. But at least he's not your basic BS artist. He doesn't lie or even do much stretching of the truth to suit his purposes. Voters sense this, and even if they think he's full of hot air sometimes, at least he doesn't lie to them. For a politician, this is a huge advantage.

Respect for the Voters After Obama won 11 straight primaries in February, the campaign looked as if it was over. (Had Clinton won 11 straight, the political establishment would have placed enormous pressure on Obama to drop out.) Then came the Rev. Wright story, which Obama was slow to respond to. But when the video of Wright's offensive sermons circulated, he gave an important speech on race in Philadelphia. He trusted that voters would take the time to hear his complex remarks in context, and he was rewarded with several million views on YouTube. Later, when Wright went wild at the National Press Club, Obama broke entirely with his former pastor, this time in a thoughtful and well-reviewed press conference. He didn't do well in most later primaries, but that was more the result of unfavorable demographics than fallout from Wright. Had Obama handled that explosive story with clumsy answers, he would have been finished.

The best example of his respect for voters came on the issue of a gas-tax holiday, which exploded on the same day as Wright's rant. That day, April 28, was the first since the New Hampshire primary when it looked as if Obama might actually lose the nomination. His pastor was a hate-America wackjob and Obama was on the wrong side of a popular pander embraced by both Clinton and McCain. Coming out against relief for hard-pressed motorists was a gutsy move. It required a slightly complicated argument and a lot of faith in the intelligence of the public. But it paid off in Indiana and North Carolina, where his campaign went back on track.

WHY CLINTON LOST
No Respect for the Voters The flipside of Obama's respect for voters was Clinton's disrespect. It began with her announcement of her candidacy in early 2007, when she said she was "in it to win it." Why else would someone run? The not-so-secret assumption behind her entire campaign was that she was the inevitable nominee. But voters don't like to be told how they will vote by politicians (or pundits). It's disrespectful. And primary voters, particularly the well-educated ones who helped power Obama's campaign, don't like to be pandered to, on the gas tax or anything else. Well-informed college-educated voters are no longer a sliver of arugula-eating elites; they are the backbone of the Democratic Party. Most of all, voters don't like to be played for fools. When Clinton ran ads in South Carolina claiming that Obama admired Ronald Reagan and must be some crypto-conservative, she wasn't just wasting her money. She was offending people in a state that proved pivotal.

The main reason South Carolina was so important, of course, was that it marked the total loss of the black vote for Clinton. Early on, she was expected to split African-American women 50-50 with Obama. This was rightly seen as critical to her success. A series of comments by Bill Clinton about Obama (starting with his inaccurate depiction of Obama's Iraq war opposition as a "fairy tale") weren't racist, but they were disrespectful to Obama, especially coming from a former president, and thus disrespectful to voters who supported him, especially blacks. While Bill was also a huge asset to Hillary, especially in later primaries where he won her lots of rural votes, the defection of 90 percent of African-American voters to Obama presented the Clinton campaign with an insurmountable problem.