McCain Wins New Hampshire: Romney Second

Most people I know classified the event of Clinton's crying as "pointless" and "insignificant gossip". Not worth discussion time. We were more interested in character development. To conceive that this incident would dramatically affect polls is improbable.

Character speculations aside, the Republican candidates' platforms for these elections are inadequate overall compared to the Democrats. It's obviously up to the Democrats for 2009. Considering Romney's professional history, however, the new president should appoint him for an economic advisory seat.

On the GOP side, the numbers for Romney suggest that people who voted for him really liked him. Almost half of those who voted for McCain

stated that they had "reservations" about him! But the picture for Romney was even worse: 36% of all voters stated that they had an either "somewhat unfavorable" or "strongly unfavorable" view of Romney! If Republicans don't like him up here, they sure aren't going to like him anywhere else around the country. He was also pegged by 30% of the voters as running the "most unfair" campaign -- he won this particular vote by a landslide. It may be time for Romney to quit.

CNN further confused things by calling it for Clinton, despite a very narrow margin of victory. Some of CNN's press corps (and Clinton herself) are painting her win as a "comeback," but

CNN's own exit polling shows that Clinton's strongest area of dominance was in the vote of people who decided over a month ago (she won nearly half of those voters, compared to Obama's 31%). Clinton did hold a very slight lead among people who decided today, but it wasn't a significant number. All of which is to say that the positive effect of Clinton's "crying" wasn't all that great, just as Bostonist suggested recently.