In politics, nothing beats hope like a good ground game and negative campaigning. Is that the lesson of New Hampshire? The dust is still settling. One longtime New Hampshire Democrat--at 2:00 am--was telling me that she believes the explanation is simple: race. Perhaps. But the Clinton camp sure turned out the dames, according to the exit polls. And the indie guys seemed to have gone with John McCain. In any event, those damn polls sure were damn wrong. They had Obama up by 4 to 13 points--"I'm just praying the spread is 9.9 percent," one top Clinton adviser said to me on Election Day afternoon--and he lost by two. The funny thing is, the same polls were right about McCain's victory over Mitt Romney. Which brings some of us back to race. Black candidates tend to do less well in voting booths than in polls. Is that what happened in New Hampshire, which, I'm told, was the last state to recognize Martin Luther King's birthday as a holiday? I dunno. And I wonder if Clinton's unfair slams on Obama made a difference. In any event, here's the piece I posted for MotherJones.com from Obama's "victory" celebration in Nashua.

HILLARY RISING: EXPERIENCE AND CONVENTIONAL POLITICS TRIUMPH IN NH

The empire strikes back.

Throughout the morning, afternoon, and early evening of Election Day in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton aides looked grim and gloomily moaned about a campaign that appeared to have been derailed, if not defeated. Expecting to lose by perhaps over 10 points, they wondered aloud what could be done to stop Barack Obama, the self-proclaimed "hope-monger," who only days earlier had seemingly rewritten modern American politics. Then the actual results started coming in, and Clinton was reborn. After being trounced in Iowa, the wife of the "comeback kid" of 1992 had managed a resurrection far more impressive than her spouse had achieved sixteen years earlier. He had merely overcome news of an extramarital affair; she had beaten back a new brand of politics.

Her surprising win--based partly on a strong performance among women and working-class voters--came after she had spent days decrying Obama's lack of experience (a legitimate point) and denouncing him as a hypocrite (not a legitimate point). With Clinton's victory, the main question of the Democratic race returns to what it had been prior to Iowa: can he beat her? But the small 3-percent margin in her favor suggested that the battle between her conventional politics and his unconventional politics has not been definitively resolved.

Throughout the campaign, Obama and Clinton have been operating on two different levels. Her playbook has been by-the-numbers: bash the Bush administration, offer red-meat policy proposals, sell her experience, talents, and strength--and, of course, raise tons of money and assemble a powerhouse organization. Obama has done all of that but within a different context. At the start, he and his advisers took one big step back and tried to envision what the electorate would be yearning for in 2008--not just the Democrats but also independents and those Republicans who did not fancy the taste of the Bush-Cheney Kool-Aid.

Clinton was practicing standard supply-side politics: push the candidate. Obama was looking at the demand side. He and his aides believed there was a desire for a break from politics-as-usual. After all, there had been a decade-and-a-half of bitter politics, as well as several years of governmental incompetence (and worse), care of the Bush administration. Opinion polls suggested deep popular dissatisfaction with the state and future of the country. The Iraq war--and its unending fallout--had soured many independents and some Republicans. And the current regime was not doing much for anyone worried about economic security, health care, or global warming. So for many Americans, the government wasn't working, and the political system was broken. They wanted change. For a potential national candidate, what was the answer? A candidacy that offered solutions and leadership that would transcend the same-old/same-old. That was Obama's theory: give 'em both a platform and, yes, hope.

In Iowa, it worked. Obama attracted newcomers to politics. He persuaded people that he had character, root principles, and the desire (if not the ability) to rise above the bickering of Washington to accomplish grand goals--that by electing him the voters themselves could be implementers of profound change. (A President Obama certainly would represent more change than a second President Clinton.) He offered them not merely a choice but the chance to be part of a cause.

In New Hampshire, his crusade crashed into prosaic political reality. Though the state--with its high percentage of upscale and well-educated voters--seemed ready-made for another Obama triumph, the Clintons had deep roots there (which was not the case in Iowa). And after being upset in Iowa, the Clinton campaign focused on its core supporters. "At Clinton headquarters, It was all women all the time," said one Democratic official. And exit polls showed that women made up 57 percent of the Democratic vote and broke dramatically for Clinton.

At campaign stops, Obama audaciously compared his campaign to great periods in U.S. history: the fight for independence, the abolition of slavery, the defeat of fascism in World War II, the suffragette movement, the civil rights movement. "There's a moment in the life of every generation," Obama told the New Hampshire voters who flooded his events, "if it is to make a mark on history, when that spirit of hopefulness must come through....This is our moment."

Clinton aides and supporters dismissed and derided all his talk of hope and change as hokey. The day before the election, Bill Clinton called Obama's pitch "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen." Again and again--in New Hampshire bars, restaurants and hotel lobbies, at campaign events--the Clintonistas voiced the mantra: Obama's a fine young man, but she has the experience, she has been vetted. Their frustration was palpable: why don't those damn voters get it. In the backroom of an Irish pub in Manchester, retired General Wesley Clark said to me that he wished Democratic voters "would show some guts," that he believed they were scared to vote for Clinton because they feared Republicans would mount a vicious anti-Hillary campaign should she be nominated. Democratic voters, he said, needed to suck it up and get behind Hillary Clinton, because she was the only candidate with deep experience. "Democrats," he complained, "fall in love. Republicans fall in line."

Working to get those Democrats into line behind her, Clinton asked voters to hire her as their champion, noting that due to her work in the White House, 7000 kids in New Hampshire had health insurance and that New Hampshire National Guard members had health care thanks to her toils in the Senate. She held campaign events--not always so well attended--where she answered long series of questions to show her command of policy details She cried--or nearly cried--at one campaign stop when discussing why she was driven to run for president. (Tons of analysis--before and after her win--focused on whether this had helped her.) And as Election Day neared, Clinton and her campaign ops went further than questioning Obama's readiness; they denigrated him as a talker, not a doer, and, worse, as a disingenuous hypocrite. Their evidence for the second half of this argument was weak--more spin than substance. (For one example, see here.)

Reporters laughed off the Clinton oppo attacks, some telling me that the campaign had been peddling (unsuccessfully) the same thin stuff to reporters for months. There's no telling--at this time--whether those cheap shots helped her. But they certainly didn't hurt. And the hypocrisy of Clinton's blasts never backfired against her. The Clinton campaign hammered Obama for slamming lobbyists but naming a (state) lobbyist for a drug company as co-chair his New Hampshire campaign. A fair point--but her campaign's chief strategist is Mark Penn, a corporate consultant who has worked for drug companies and other favorite Democratic targets. The Clintonites did not allow themselves to be inconvenienced by such contradictions. And virtually no one called them on it.

In the meantime, the Clinton campaign's get-out-the-gals ground game plodded ahead--even though on Election Day, Clinton people did not appear to have much faith in it. "This is not working," Elizabeth Bagley, a Clinton adviser and fundraiser, said at mid-day. "There obviously has to be a retooling of the campaign." And talk swirled that the Clinton campaign was about to undergo a dramatic shakeup. ("We're always adding new people to the team," a not-so-cheerful-looking Terry McAuliffe, the campaign chairman, told me.) The politerati pondered whether or not Clinton would pull out of Nevada, which holds a first-time caucus on January 19, and South Carolina, which has a primary election on January 26, and make her final stand on Super-Duper Tuesday, February 5, when 24 states will hold primaries or caucuses. "We need a time-out," said a Clinton adviser, "something to stop the momentum, so we can have a reality check." Clinton got much more than a stop-in-play.

With his lofty calls for change and his invitation to voters to join him in a grand political experiment, Obama, in Iowa, flipped the script. "We shook up every political assumption," he said while campaigning in New Hampshire. But now Clinton--even though she won by only a few thousand votes--has flipped it back. And the new narrative is again the old narrative. Their Election Night speeches reflected the fundamental divide of the race. Obama declared, "The reason our campaign has always been different...is because it's not just about what I will do as president....It's about what you can do to change" the nation. Clinton proclaimed, "It's time we had a president who stands up for all of you." He was still selling a movement; she was still selling herself. The primaries ahead will show who has a better sense of the market--and, just as important (as New Hampshire reminded all), who has a better delivery system.

Like you, I'm waiting to see what those so-important New Hampshire voters are going to do. After chasing the candidates--all of them!--around the state for nearly a week, today is a day of calm. The candidates tend to do little, other than visit polling places and shake hands. There won't be any speeches, there will be few press releases blasting an opponent. No one wants to make any last-minute mistake. There's often an eerie calm on Election Day. So below are some reflections first posted on MotherJones.com on what a loss might mean for Hillary Clinton's presidential ambitions.

ELECTION DAY IN NH: HILLARY'S LAST HURRAH?

Last night, at a rally near the Manchester airport, Hillary Clinton packed 'em in. A thousand or so people listened to her deliver a long speech outlining virtually every policy position she has ever mentioned during the campaign. On one level, it was an impressive performance. She demonstrated a command of policy and facts. She spoke passionately about her intellectual passions. On another level, it was, perhaps, too much too late. As at least two reporters in the room --including Mickey Kaus--quipped, it seemed she was delivering a State of the Union speech, particularly the sort that her husband use to give. Remember how he would go over a long laundry list of policy proposals? One of the biggest cheers of the night came when she said that if elected president she would make sure the federal student aide form wouldn't be too long.

This was as good as she gets. The crowd was pumped--though it did lose some energy as she went on and on. (And on Election Day eve, you don't want to tire out supporters who have to get up early the next morning and start working for you.) She pointed out that she was the candidate who was strong enough and experienced enough to deliver the change that the American electorate yearns for. But she took no pot shots at her opponents. "Time to tell her story," a Clinton aide said to me.

It's not such a bad story. And did the size of the crowd indicate she might just be able to pull out a win in New Hampshire? Once upon a time--that would be sixteen years ago--another Clinton became the self-proclaimed "comeback kid" of New Hampshire. (That was after placing second in New Hampshire. Talk about chutzpah!) There's no reporter in New Hampshire I've spoken to who thinks that HRC can pull it out. Instead, we discuss how big Barack Obama's win will be--and what the point spread will mean. Some political commentators claim that if Clinton can hold him to a 6-point or less win, she can claim a moral victory. I dunno. Seems to me that whatever the win is, as long as it's more than a close call, the important statistic will be this: 2 for 2.

At their morning and afternoon events yesterday, Obama continued to soar, preaching his politics of hope, and Clinton continued to blast away at him, using weak ammo. His events were jammed. Hers (until the evening rally) were not. At a gym in Dover, there was an embarrassingly small crowd, and a Politico reporter spent an hour trying to find young pro-Clinton voters in the room. She failed. At the opera house in Rochester, hundreds of people waited in the cold for Obama, and then many did not get in.

I'm not making any prediction. But I would be stunned if Obama does not end this day with a commanding lead. And the key question of the Democratic race will only become sharper: what is she to do? I keep saying this: he's selling vision, she's selling vegetables. You can't beat vision by saying my vegetables are better yours--especially if the consumers are in the mood for vision.

And where can she stop him? In Nevada, which will hold a caucus on January 19? That caucus--a first-time event in the state--will likely be quite small. And the one political powerhouse in the state--the culinary workers union--seems poised to endorse Obama. (That endorsement could come on Wednesday.) Nevada might easily become Obama's third in a row. So South Carolina? It's hard to envision the dominant African-American vote in that state not flowing to a sweeping Obama. Some pundits floating about New Hampshire are saying Clinton ought to pull out of South Carolina. If she did, she would appear weak. But if she looses there, she would appear weak. She has no good choices in South Carolina.

That leaves Super Duper Tuesday on February 5 as the place for Clinton to make her final stand, if the Obama wave doesn't crash on its own. That's a long way off. Then again, it's in less than a month. In a way, she's being forced into a Rudy Giuliani strategy: loose all the initial bouts and then shoot the moon in the near-national primary. It's a tough model for success. Will she be able to beat back Obama in California, the key prize of February 5?

Politics is a fluid business. But things, at the moment, do seem grim for the Clinton gang. So maybe Kaus was right, and last night Clinton delivered her fantasy State of the Union speech because she realizes she might never get to do it for real.

I've been dashing around New Hampshire, chasing candidates (large and small). Is anything happening in the world south of Nashua? So while I'm on the run, allow me to repurpose--as they say--a report I filed for MotherJones.com. Here it is:

The morning after, it got nasty.

At Saturday night's Democratic debate in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton served notice she was looking to tear down Barack Obama with two charges: he's a flip-flopper and he's all talk and no action. And moments after the debate ended, her aides trotted out to the so-called spin room to hammer home these points.

Consequently, it was no surprise that on Sunday morning, she began a day of campaign events in which she declared that New Hampshire voters should elect "a doer, not a talker" and that it was time to distinguish "rhetoric from reality." Her campaign released a statement emphasizing this line of attack that was headlined, "Rhetoric vs. Results, Talk vs. Action." It was not subtle:

At the debate last night it was clear when opponents were asked what change they had made:

Instead of telling New Hamphsire voters what he had done for them, Barack Obama defended rhetoric and talk and cited legislation that bans sit-down meals with lobbyists but allows them to stand up and eat together.

Obama talked about government reform, but denied that the co-chair of his New Hampshire campaign is a lobbyist. He talked about energy reform but couldn't defend his vote in favor of Dick Cheney's energy plan that gave the big oil companies billions in tax breaks. He talked about his speech against the war, but didn't explain why he voted for $300 billion in funding for the war and why he said as late as 2004 that he didn't know how he would have voted on the war.

The Clinton campaign was doing its best to stretch the little oppo research it has been able to dig up on Obama. When Obama voted for the energy bill--which passed the Senate on an 85 to 12 vote--he said that the measure had fallen short of what was necessary to achieve U.S. energy independence. Environmentalists did not fancy the bill, but over half of the Democrats in the Senate supported the legislation. Most of them came from states that would benefit from the subsidies in the bill--as did Obama. This vote was not a shining moment for Obama, but it represented a conventional political decision (help your state), not hypocrisy. As for the Iraq war funding issue, Obama, like other Democratic senators opposing the war (including Clinton), has voted for bills financing the war. Regarding Obama's New Hampshire co-chair, Jim Demers, the Clinton gang did have a point. He is a lobbyist for drug interests and other groups--but in New Hampshire, not Washington, the Obama campaign say. Still, he is an influence-peddler of the sort Obama has decried.

All told, though, the Clinton campaign did not present a strong case. Then came the robo-call charge.

On Sunday afternoon, the Clinton campaign zapped out an email to reporters accusing Obama of conducting illegal campaign activities. The press release said that the Clinton campaign had received reports from New Hampshire voters who were on the do-not-call list but who had received prerecorded calls from the Obama campaign. Under New Hampshire law, it is illegal to robo-call people on the do-not-call registry, and state law requires a prerecorded call to identify its sponsor within 30 seconds. This particular call did not do so for 38 seconds. (The call contained a message from a Planned Parenthood official who said that Obama has a "100 percent pro-choice record." The Clinton campaign has slammed Obama for voting present--neither yea or nay--on seven abortion-related bills during his years as an Illinois state senator.) The Obama campaign, the Clinton crew asserted, "appears" to have violated the law.

The Clinton campaign arranged a conference call for reporters to discuss this pressing matter. During the call, Kathy Sullivan, a co-chair of the Clinton effort in New Hampshire, denounced Obama for the robo-calls. But when a reporter asked how many instances she could cite of a person on the do-not-call list being bothered by one of these messages, she replied, two. That's not a lot.

The Clinton campaign is clearly in the throw-whatever-we-have mode and is hoping that something--anything!---sticks. During this conference call, I questioned Howard Wolfson, the campaign's communications director, about the charge that Obama had been inconsistent on the Iraq war. Hillary Clinton, I noted, now opposes the war, but she, too, has voted to fund it. Isn't it a bit unfair, I asked, for her to slap Obama for doing the same? But Obama, Wolfson countered, "said one thing when he was running for the Senate and then changed his mind."

Obama's campaign says that when he was campaigning for the Senate he opposed the $87 billion funding bill under consideration at the time because it included unnecessary spending. (He then voted for other war funding legislation when he became a senator.) So I asked Wolfson if Clinton was attacking Obama the same way that George W. Bush's campaign had assailed Senator John Kerry, who first supported the $87 billion package but then opposed it after Bush and the Republicans refused to suspend tax cuts for the wealthy to pay for it. Wolfson acknowledged that "there certainly could be...a change of policy, a change of circumstance" that caused Obama to shift his view regarding war funding legislation. But he went on to claim that Obama had changed his approach toward health care, gun control, and mandatory minimum sentences for criminal convictions. "In the case of Senator Obama," he said, "you see a pattern....This is important information for people to know." And, he implied, we're damn sure going to get it to them.

The Obama campaign was preparing itself for the last-minute onslaught. And on Sunday afternoon, David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, was punching back. Concerning Clinton's charge that Obama is all poetry and no production, he told me, "I don't know where she was when he passed the single biggest ethics reform since Watergate as well as significant arms control legislation. Maybe she wasn't there when he passed the Google bill, which would put the federal budget on line. I know she's not familiar with what he did in Illinois, where he passed legislation on health care reform and death penalty reform. She must be unfamiliar, or there's another possibility: she is willfully distorting the truth." Axelrod said he is expecting more of the same: "She has failed to convince the people of New Hampshire that she should be president. She will spend her time now trying to convince them Barack Obama shouldn't be."

At a Sunday rally in Derry, New Hampshire, Barack Obama, speaking to a large crowd, indirectly replied to Clinton's get-Obama strategy. "Being against something--that's easy," he said, adding, "the reason why people came out in Iowa is because they want to be for something." With new polls showing Obama leading Clinton by up to 13 points, there's not much time for the Clinton campaign's nicks to draw signficant blood. But each day, the attacks (well-founded or not) get sharper. The question is whether they are relevant to the dynamics of the Democratic race--which have been defined so far by Obama's message not Clinton's. As I noted earlier, he's selling vision, she's selling vegetables. Those voters yearning for the former may not be persuadable by the conventional (and occasionally petty) attacks mounted in conventional style by the conventional campaign of Hillary Clinton. Tuesday will show whether Obama's soaring politics of hope can be brought to Earth by Clinton's ground fire. If it cannot be, what else will--or can--she try?

The Republican primary contest in New Hampshire has turned into a festival of recrimination, with the candidates arguing over which campaign is violating the supposed 11th Commandment of the GOP: thou shall not attack a fellow Republican. (Yeah, right.) And at the GOP debate on Saturday night, amid this bitter bickering, Mitt Romney got caught (oh so easily) in a lie.

During a heated exchange about illegal immigration--the hot topic of the night--John McCain accused Romney of falsely calling the immigration plan McCain tried to pass in Congress "amnesty" for illegal immigrants. McCain was mad:

It's not amnesty. And for you to describe it as you do in the attack ads, my friend, you can spend your whole fortune on these attack ads, but it still won't be true.

In defense, Romney shot back:

I don't describe your plan as amnesty in my ad. I don't call it amnesty.

Immediately after the debate, in the so-called spin room, Senator Lindsey Graham was spinning for McCain and blasting Romney for running negative ads against candidates and not owning up to doing so. As Graham fumed, a McCain aide shoved into his hand a flyer that Romney had mailed out to potential voters. The piece was an attack on McCain, and one of its key charges was that McCain supports amnesty. "Look at this," Graham said. Gotcha!

This one scene was representative of the larger narrative: the other candidates do seem to detest Romney at the moment, believing he's running a dirtier-than-permitted campaign. The good news for Democrats: there's plenty of time for the GOP contest to get even nastier. Then again, the same can be said of the Democratic race.

I'm in New Hampshire, reporting for my home base, Mother Jones. Here's a list of my recent dispatches:

* How HRC previewed her get-Obama strategy at the Democratic debate. Click here.

* How Romney became an Obama copycat, how McCain became a self-proclaimed "agent of change," and how Mike Huckabee became a Chuck Norris sidekick. Click here.

* How Clinton has had a tough time trying to dash Obama's hope. Click here.

If you're not overwhelmed by New Hampshire coverage, check out these dispatches.

At Milly's Tavern in Manchester, New Hampshire--where Barack Obama campaign workers had assembled to watch the Iowa caucus results on Thursday night--there was only one question on the mind of the few reporters in the room: what is Hillary Clinton to do now?

By trouncing Clinton by 8 points, Obama shifted the political landscape. If he had won by merely a few points and Clinton and John Edwards had finished close, the race in New Hampshire probably would have been just a continuation of the Iowa contest, with the candidates sticking to their basic gameplans and messages. Finishing (as of this writing) in third place and losing by a significant amount, Clinton and her strategists cannot look at New Hampshire and say, "We just have to do what we've been doing better and hope it will play better before a different audience of Democrats and independents." No, you lose by 8 points, you have to make some changes.

But what changes?

Hillary Clinton has four days to try something else--and two of those days are the weekend. And for it to work, it will have to be big and be bold, so that New Hampshire voters truly notice. One obvious option: go nuclear on Obama. Clinton could, for instance, attempt to frighten--really frighten--voters about his lack of experience.

But when Clinton has attacked Obama in the past, it hasn't done her much good. She fell in the polls after tearing into him. As one Clinton adviser told me a few weeks ago, Clinton plays better as victim than attacker. What else could she do? Let Bill loose? He was ably deployed in Iowa, and that didn't do the trick. Are there other surrogates she could call on who could have an impact in New Hampshire?

Moreover, any dramatic move she might make at this point has the potential of casting her as desperate. Voters, like dogs, can smell fear. She's in a tough fix.

Despite the beer that was flowing at Milly's, none of us reporters cooked up any good ideas for HRC. She's on her own. Iowa was one damn big siren-screaming warning for the Clintonites. Young voters, independents, women and others turned out for Obama, endorsing his message of change and embracing him as the messenger. During his eloquent victory speech, Obama seemed to be riding a wave of history. (Talk about peaking at the right moment.)

In the heat of the moment--especially at Milly's--it's easy to overemphasize Iowa and even, perhaps, New Hampshire. There are other contests after the Granite State, and Clinton has plenty of money to keep her campaign fueled all the way to Super Duper Tuesday on February 5. She could opt to hang tight and hope to best Obama in later rounds. But Obama's triumph in Iowa does suggest that what Clinton has been doing ain't working. To win, she, too, might have to embrace change.

McCAIN'S 1000-YEAR WAR. At a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Thursday night, John McCain told me that he wouldn't mind if U.S. troops stay in Iraq for a "thousand" years, as long as American casualties are declining. Read my report on this here.