According to sources on her campaign team, if Clinton had lost in New Hampshire, several senior advisers, including her communications director, Howard Wolfson, were planning to offer their resignation, and Clinton was prepared to skip the next two contests, Nevada and South Carolina, a decision that could have ceded all the momentum, and even the nomination, to Obama. There was never, of course, that level of tabloid drama inside the Clinton campaign-not even remotely-but Obama’s Iowa win did start a panic in Hillaryland. Back then, his chief primary opponent, Blair Hull, never recovered from the release of divorce records in which his ex-wife accused him of threatening to kill her, and Obama’s presumed general-election opponent, Jack Ryan, quit the campaign after the release of child-custody records in which his ex-wife said that he tried to pressure her to have sex in front of patrons at various clubs. There were echoes of his 2004 Senate race, when he did not so much defeat his hapless opponents as benefit from their self-immolation. Victory is generally accompanied by more sweat and grit than Obama appeared to be investing in New Hampshire. Furthermore, the results in Iowa seemed to affirm the idea that Obama’s exotic Kansan-Kenyan ancestry was not a liability but an asset, a visual reminder of the kind of transformation he preaches.įor those five days, Obama made politics seem effortless. But, remarkably, in Iowa he fought Hillary Clinton to a draw among union households and bested John Edwards and Clinton among Independents and Republicans. Following in the path of Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, and Howard Dean, Obama was typed as the candidate of Starbucks liberals (latte having long ago replaced Chardonnay in the iconography of the pundits), someone with little working-class appeal who could never break out of the demographic borders of the young and well educated. It was also a tenet of conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton had a tight grip on female voters, and yet Obama beat her by five points among women. Obama, though, won a majority of voters under thirty, who, according to the Obama campaign, made up nine per cent of the Iowa electorate in 2004 and climbed to twenty-two per cent this year. Relying on college kids to win a race normally controlled by geriatrics was thought to be tactical folly.

Everything about Obama’s Iowa triumph seemed to defy history and shred doubts about his candidacy, including his relative lack of Washington experience.

The brief interregnum between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary may be remembered as a time when it appeared that the magical qualities ascribed to Barack Obama included an ability to suspend all the ordinary rules of politics. Obama had not suspended the rules of politics after all.

Effortless victory crossword