What a difference a day makes.
Watching Hillary's boring victory speech in New Hampshire, I had the overwhelming sensation that I'd been had. Like many women, including the Nation's Katha Pollitt and my own mother-in-law, I was outraged by the sexist coverage of Hillary's tears.
But when Clinton made reference to her new, softer campaign style and told New Hampshire voters "I found my voice" in that state, my sympathy evaporated.
The Clinton spin cycle never rests.
Women gave Hillary her New Hampshire comeback. The tidal wave of first-time voters Obama counts on didn't materialize. Women who, like me, didn't want to see the first woman candidate taken out by old-fashioned sexism may have been motivated to vote for her by the combination of her newly humanized campaign and backlash against the media pile-on.
Whether or not she was actually calculating enough to plan that narrative, Clinton certainly knew enough to ride it. All I can say is, yuck.
The pure phoniness of the Clinton campaign was visible in the New Hampshire victory speech. Those "READY for Change" signs are reminiscent of nothing so much as George W. Bush's "Reformer with Results" slogan, which was designed, as is the Clinton campaign, to co-opt the enthusiasm for a more genuinely grassroots candidate.
Change is not what Clinton is going to bring us.
There has been a Clinton or a Bush in the White House longer than college-aged voters have been alive. She knew enough to get Madeleine Albright out of the background in New Hampshire, but the young voters she had standing behind her looked lost as she rattled off the usual empty phrases. At one point they broke into inappropriate applause when she mentioned "students who can't afford to go to college."
Contrast that with Obama's soaring rhetoric about the dishwasher in Nevada and the poor students in South Carolina and L.A. who turn out to have a lot in common, and the genuine, rousing response he got from his diverse crowd of supporters chanting, "Yes, we can.”
If Thomas Edsall of the Huffington Post is right about a covert 527 effort by Clinton supporters to swift-boat Obama, the "come-back kid" will wipe the mist right out of your eyes.