Well, yeah...at the end, Hillary took the stage with Bill and Chelsea and she proclaimed victory to her supporters just as it had always been planned. Sure, they needed to spin it as favorably as they could, and yes they were most certainly relieved that the numbers gave them an excuse to claim the victory, but the reality was that she had just suffered a tremendous defeat in only winning by the thinnest of margins.
I have now seen three post-Iowa polls that show the same tremendous bounce Bernie received by overcoming all odds. His speech following Hillary’s was the clincher, saying the same things he had said a hundred times before, but he knew he was talking to a lot of people for the first time, and he really hit it out of the ballpark.
They are the kind of results that are going to persuade a lot of Dems in South Carolina to take a fresh look at the man and the things he says that so many people are responding to. The magnitude of this [contextual] defeat also explains what we saw in Hillary’s performance during the last debate, a performance that her advisers will see as very tough and bold, but in the end, it just didn’t overcome what Bernie was saying about the Big Picture.
I don’t know how it is all going to end up, but I never expected such a big boost so early.
Maybe she can recover from these self-inflicted wounds, enough to make the nomination outcome uncertain by convention time, but I find that possibility very doubtful. We’ve seen her on the downside of the momentum game before and I’m not sure she can contort her presentation of herself enough to make Democrats fear this guy [she’s trying]. A man who, in all reality, is every average American’s best friend.