Ryan Lizza reports on an unusual boo-boo in Hillary Clinton's last Iowa event. Apparently, the venue was a little unfortunate -- a museum with a display of extinct mammoths. Lizza writes:
The skeleton of one of the beasts loomed ominously a few yards from the Clintons, and the museum’s exhibit explained that the mammoths were witnesses to change because they “watched as their world disappeared and their dominance was usurped.” The Clinton nostalgia tour plays better in New Hampshire, so it’s premature to declare the collapse of the Clintoncene epoch.
Clinton's Iowa campaign seemed less relevant to the Iowa scene than her competitors'. Too many of the organizers were clearly from Washington and other points non-Iowan. During one caucus in Brookview, the Clinton supporters were shepherded by a volunteer -- Karen Brooks -- who, unfortunately, came right out of D.C. where she is "a Washington consultant to multinational corporations operating in Asia. Her last vaguely political post was director of Asia affairs for the National Security Council." She worked hard against lousy odds.
The Obama group kept growing, and his supporters soon ran out of chairs. The Clinton people sat quietly—they had plenty of seats—and watched as Brooks worked the room. When I asked Brooks how things were going, she pointed across the gym, sighed, and said, “It’s hard. Look at that.” She said that her campaign had projected that eighty-seven people would show up in the precinct; [caucus chairman] Riordan announced that the total was three times as many, at two hundred and sixty-three. After some horse-trading, the final tally was a hundred and fifty-five for Obama, sixty-three for Edwards, and forty-five for Clinton. The pattern was repeated across the state.
It's tough for people who have gotten used to leadership to absorb the reality that their big time in center stage is over. That's what we may be watching as the Clinton's scramble to hold their ground. If they let go, how they let go will say a lot about them. Certainly Hillary Clinton's speech on caucus night in Iowa in which she conceded to Obama was gallant and admirable. If that genuinely reflects how she operates in the political scrum, she'll do just fine.
