Chris Farley was a loveable doofus. So is Dennis Kucinich, who must have been watching Farley’s Black Sheep last week. The 1996 Farley-Spade catastrophe features a climax in which Mike Donnelly (Farley) miraculously uncovers voting fraud, discovering deceased citizens tallied as votes for his brother’s opponent.
Kucinich, championing the voting integrity Farley’s character so fervently defended, demanded Jan. 10 a recount of the New Hampshire primary. His qualms were rooted in the disparity between the hand-counted votes, which favored Obama, and the machine-counted votes, which favored Clinton. He forked over $27,000 for the recount process, which began last Wednesday.
Across political lines, suspicions have mounted. Republican nobody Albert Howard paid $56,000 to the already frazzled New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office to recount the GOP votes. Howard’s fury was ignited when he received a final total of 44 votes, when he at one point had more than 170.
Cyberspace, too, has teemed with accusations and rebuttals. Clinton’s surprise victory went against the predictions of more than a dozen polls, which had Obama winning comfortably. Four indicated he would win by double digits.
Medill Lecturer Thomas Diemer wasn’t surprised. He has covered campaign trails and speaks about them like a man without a schedule. As a lecturer in Medill’s Washington program, Diemer follows campaigns like a watchdog, formulating confident, crisp analyses at turbo speed. He didn’t suspect anything illicit in the discrepancy between the polls and results in New Hampshire.
“They were lagging behind,” Diemer said. “The polls couldn’t catch up with [Hillary] because what they missed was that she out-campaigned [Obama]. And not the pollsters, but the reporters were lulled into a sense of Obama momentum by the excitement and buzz on the ground. Hillary ran a better campaign. She was very well-organized… And the moment her voice cracked in the interview, she galvanized women voters behind her.”
Medill Professor Jack Doppelt, who has co-written a book on voters in America, wasn’t expecting the New Hampshire primaries to run the course they did.
“It was reasonable to assume that Obama would win in Iowa and it was equally unreasonable to assume that he wouldn’t in New Hampshire, especially because of the ‘Iowa bump,’” Doppelt said.
Some other notable campaign surprises
Iowa voters: Romney? No, Huckabee.
Bill Clinton, while campaigning for Hillary before the Iowa caucus, predicted that Gov. Mike Huckabee would triumph there.
“He looks to me like the only one who can tell a joke,” Mr. Clinton said of the bleak pool of Republican nominees. (How weird is it that we say “Mr.” now instead of “President”?)
Diemer said that he suspected voters in Iowa wanted to get comfortable with Romney, but just couldn’t. Huckabee fit the the conservative Christian mold they were looking for.
Fat resumes vs. fat wallets: Who’s out of the race already?
Sen. Chris Dodd is a Red Sox fan. His otherwise corpulent resume – chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, 33 combined years on the House and Senate – simply can’t compete with the negative press associated with Red Sox Nation. The Boston baseball franchise, arguably the most hated team in all of sports, is fast writing the obituaries for not only Dodd’s politcal career, but friendship, faith and integrity.
Gov. Bill Richardson, the charming mediator of the Democratic portion of the New Hampshire debates, was the secretary of energy and a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He is also a former member of the House of Representatives and has been lauded by Democrats and Republicans for bolstering the economy in New Mexico.
Sen. Joe Biden had an equally impressive history. He was also incredibly smart.
They’re all out.
“Say what you want about them,” Diemer said, “but they’ve got fat résumés and they are qualified. They’re already out? How can this be?”
Fat resumes can’t compete with fat wallets anymore. Politicians can’t compete with rock stars.
Who is John Kerry supporting? Not his former running mate.
In South Carolina, John Edwards was cool and restrained as he responded to John Kerry’s endorsement of Obama.
“I respect John’s decision,” Edwards said. “When we were running against each other and on the same ticket we agreed on many issues.” Sounds like pretty shallow praise.
The populist Edwards has staked out the left of the Democratic candidates, waging a campaign of class warfare.
“Edwards is a different candidate than he was four years ago,” Diemer said. “I don’t think that his kind of campaign appealed to Kerry. It was always a marriage of convenience. I don’t think they’re drinking buddies.”
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The campaign wars persist! Negative campaign ads and endless debates abound! Obama and Clinton prepare to duke it out in South Carolina while Romney’s resurgence provides a more stable punching bag for Republican adversaries.
The surprises aren’t over. Nowhere near.