Talk about lame spin. What I’ve seen from Clinton’s side is:
1. She’s the first woman to win the Iowa Caucuses! Yeah, and Ted Cruz was the first Latino to win the Iowa Caucuses. And Sanders would have been the first New York Jew to win the Iowa Caucuses. So? Somehow, this seems so … last century. If a rabbit had won for the first time, that would have been a story.
For the record, other than Clinton in 2008 I believe the only other woman to receive any votes at all in an Iowa Caucus was Shirley Chisolm, in 1972.
2. Yesterday a meme was circulating on social media — HRC’s photo with the words, “The people of Iowa gave her their trust.” The population of Iowa is 3.1 million. Of those, 171,109 participated in the Dem caucuses. We don’t know actual raw vote counts, but we know the votes must have been close to a tie. By my calculations, Clinton won the trust of roughly .0003 percent of the people of Iowa.
3. [Gloating] We Won. Suck it up, Berniebots. So endearing.
She’s a terrible campaigner. The woman has her strengths and virtues, but HRC to political campaigning is like Pat Boone to R&B.
Some of the Sanders supporters are not taking the near-loss well. Some of them seem to have expected Sanders would crush Clinton, even though pre-caucus polls mostly predicted she would win. There’s also a lot of grumbling that some precinct captains had their thumb on the scale for Clinton, so to speak, but frankly there is nothing to be gained by going there. The Iowa delegation will be nearly evenly divided between Sanders and Clinton delegates. Who “won” is not going to matter down the road.
The Sanders campaign reports that he received $3 million in donations in the 24 hours after the Caucuses. Now, there’s some good spinning for you. He is also refusing to concede defeat in Iowa (as close as it was, I don’t blame him) and he’s also pushing for more debates. Still, all the data suggest he’s going to be crushed in every primary after New Hampshire.
If Marco “baby cheeks” Rubio is the eventual GOP nominee IMO Clinton (presumably) will crush him. Next to her, he’s going to look like somebody who should be finishing up his homework before he can go to Little League practice. She’s also not going to hesitate in going after him for his hard Right positions on reproductive freedom. But it’s too early to count Trump out, I think.
Couple o’ things to read — Charles Pierce describes an interview of Hillary Clinton by Chris Matthews that sounds, well, horrible. When is Tweety going to retire already? Also, I don’t always agree with Matt Yglesias, but I think he nailed the problem with Democratic establishment here.