The results of the New Hampshire primary help explain why politics is so fascinating for those of us who cover it, even though we all look more than faintly ridiculous right now.

I don't have a clear explanation for how Hillary Clinton defied the polls and prognosticators to win, but amid our compromised credibility as analysts, let me humbly try. I do so with the help of my wife, Emily Lazar, whose own switching back and forth between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama may mirror some of what went on in the minds of ambivalent New Hampshire women, whose last-minute shift back to Clinton gave her the victory.

The gender gap that has characterized general elections in this country for a generation has now opened up within the Democratic Party, too. If men and women had voted in the Democratic primary in equal numbers, Obama would have won. But 57 percent were women. In that sense, the continued failure of the Democrats to attract male voters helped determine the outcome of this contest.

A more local factor may have been that many male independents figured that it made more sense to vote in the GOP primary for John McCain. If they were torn between McCain and Obama, as dozens I met were, the polls and pundits suggested that Obama didn't need their support. He was by all accounts comfortably ahead.

That left them free to help their sentimental favorite, McCain, slay former governor Mitt Romney of neighboring Massachusetts, whose policies are loathed by Granite State Democrats. (Judging by his loss, by Republicans too.) So they voted in the Republican primary.