Hilary Clinton's trumping of Obama in N.H. by just little over 2 points is an unexpected victory there even from the perspective of some of her own campaign people who were anticipating another Obama upset. According to politico.com Obama is still the pied piper for the youth vote between the ages of 18-24 (indeed Obama got 57% of the under-30 voters in Iowa) but what surprised expectations is that in N.H., Clinton clinched the 25-29 year old voters who were old enough to appreciate the nostalgia of the good old days of Bill before the dark ages of Bush and his neo-Conservative oligarchy. But this is a narrow margin for winning and as even Bill Clinton had predicted about his wife's race (which seems to somewhat resemble his own pattern of losses/wins in his run in '92), she'd have a tough battle in the early primaries/caucuses but prevail in the national election. To further add to prognostications and election calculus, no U.S. President was ever elected who lost both Iowa and New Hampshire. So her victory is a foot in the Obama door which was seemingly about to shut her down.

I think she was able to deliver her own saving grace precisely in the N.H. Democratic Debates when she was asked to comment about Obama's general popularity and the sense that more people liked him over her. Masterfully, she responded with an almost girlishly shy grin and said, "That hurts my feelings...I'll try to go on anyway." Even with the armor of my political cynicism raised I felt a slight lurch in my heart as if I had just encountered a flirtatious girl at a cocktail party. The camera shot to Obama who was caught peering down and looking rather peevish. There is a certain comedy of errors involved in U.S. politics that is entirely centered around petty perceptions and subjective qualifications that have no place in the rational marketplace of ideas and discourse and yet as a country we continually seek affability, humanity, and some intangible quotient in our Presidents that would speak to our comfort level of having someone we can trust at the nation's helm. After all, we largely elect them and hope and trust they'll do their job without us having to pay too much attention to them unless of course they architect a misguided war, condone torture, illegally wiretap its own citizens, plunder the national deficit, and perpetuate a perception of Presidential mediocrity so profound that the politics of discontent ushers in Presidential hopefuls such as Senator Obama who's lean senatorial resume only extends to 10 years in the U.S. Senate.

Experience and Change are not dichotomous choices. Truth is, any Democratic candidate (and just about any Republican candidate for that matter except for Giuliani or Huckabee perhaps) would be intrinsically an agent of change. If Change is the moral of the story coming out of Iowa and Obama the so called Change candidate, it was Experience and political nostalgia that edged him out slightly in New Hampshire under Hilary. This is a more complex race across all lines of age, gender, race, and socioeconomics, and indicates the nation is really trying to visulize what it will look like to have someone else in the Oval Office other than Bush 43 after 8 years of moral and political fatigue.