Responses to candidates are largely visceral. You are not impressed by Hillary's presentation; I am. You are impressed by Obama's and feels he makes them 'sing'; I believe that he is very flexible in his use of 'facts' and don't feel that his gift for rhetoric makes up for all the ways in which he is clearly not at her level in terms of anything else.

It's true that she may lose the nomination by a hair that she was supposed to take by a landslide. This is failure, but not of the definitive sort you seem to suggest.

In fairness, the bulk of your article was extremely well written and very fair, it was simply the opening two paragraphs that bothered me – imagine an article on Obama that started out with something to the effect of “With a campaign perceived to be based on little more than 'Why can't we all just get along' Obama finds himself unable to break into Hillary Clinton's double-digit poll lead in Ohio and Texas.” While an argument could be made that some polls show this to be true, and many saying that Obama's message is nothing more than “kumbaya”, it would be tough to see such an article as being unbiased. That said, the remainder of your article was insightful and reflected well on this site.

And I agree with your comments – just as the NY Times piece undoubtedly brought some who were attacking him to support McCain, it seems that some of Hillary's support in New Hampshire from undecideds was motivated by those attacking her and calling her campaign “finished”. That said, the bulk of her support and successes came from people who believed in her campaign, and it is important to remember that if she loses, it was not because she was a horrible candidate so much as because she came up against a candidate who represented what the country was looking for better than she did.

Most voters are, I think, fair-minded. Some New Hampshire Democrats, certain that Obama would win and that their votes for Clinton wouldn't matter, decided to send a message to the sexists who wanted to spurn Clinton for her tears. If you read the piece I wrote about “tears in New Hampshire,” which is linked in this post, you'll see that I compared the critique of Clinton choking up to a similar one involving Ed Muskie back in 1972. Then, Muskie was the victim of similar attacks to those of Edwards and the right wing talk show hosts. Those attacks brought him down. It's another measure of the decreasing influence of sexism and, more importantly, our willingness to accept the humanity of our candidates, that in 2008, people rallied around Clinton. That wasn't the case for poor Muskie.

The switched votes in New Hampshire, voters making a statement about their rejection of what they saw as a sexist attack–and which, in many cases, probably was a sexist attack, gave Clinton her win there and extended a candidacy which, after her loss in the Iowa caucuses, would have spelled the end of her candidacy.

I hope that this clarifies what I was saying here. Thanks for your comments.

Mark Daniels

One of the most appealing aspects of Obama is something that many of his supporters (myself included) need to remember – he is asking Americans to remember that we are ALL Americans. Clinton has dedicated her life to the government of this country and done many good things in her career, and that's worth highlighting even though she may not be the candidate that the majority of Democrats are choosing to support right now. Obama will most likely win the nomination, but remember that a significant number of people supported her and did so for good reasons.