Hill Climbing

» NYT: The Clinton Surprise (Judith Warner)

The shocks just keep on coming:

Hillary Clinton leads the Democratic field with 51 percent of the vote.

She beats Barack Obama by 24 percentage points among black Democrats.

She is projected now to beat Giuliani - or at the very least to be in a statistical dead heat with him in the general election.

This wasn't supposed to happen. According to the received wisdom of those in-the-know here in Washington, Hillary was supposed to be divisive, unelectable, "radioactive."

It was the fault of Bill and Monica, and the fact that you never knew when there was going to be another Bill and Monica. It was the fault of Hillary - for not taking the hard line on Bill and Monica the way a woman of her stature and standing was supposed to do. And it was the fault of voters - those people out there who would never, ever elect another Clinton.

Why? Because ... everyone said so.

("I think the one thing we know about Hillary, the one thing we absolutely know, bottom line, [is] she can`t win, right?" is how MSNBC host Tucker Carlson once put it to New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart. "She is unelectable.")

The "we" world of Tucker Carlson knew what they knew about Hillary Clinton -- right up until about this week, I think -- because they spend an awful lot of time talking to, socializing with and interviewing one another.

What they don't do all that much is venture outside of a certain set of zip codes to get a feel for the way most people are actually living. They don't sign up for adjustable rate mortgages, visit emergency rooms to get their primary health care, leave their children in unlicensed day care or lose their jobs because they have to drive their mothers home from the hospital after hip replacement surgery.

Hillary Clinton's supporters, it turns out, do.

What's amazing about all of this is that Hillary doesn't borrow some poll-tested cliche like "Two Americas" to essentially describe just that. Furthermore, I think Warner's take re: Hillary could just as easily be applied to the blogosphere. Needless to say, I think Warner is spot-on with regard to her understanding of the Clinton dynamic. I'm not as sold on her analysis of the economic underpinnings of it ... it's arguably an arguable case she makes. I mean, I'm less sure that Hillary's resonance as a candidate is really due to a whopping difference of .4 percentage points in the percentage of income earned by the Top 1%. In other words, Warner may have the narrative down ... just not the mathematical formula.

From another angle, EJ Dionne has a curious view on how the MA-5 contest might portend a thing or two for the 2008 races. In the midst of his own analysis on how immigration as an issue might play out, however, he offers his own conventional wisdom:

Tsongas, a lawyer whose experience in politics dates to Eugene McCarthy's 1968 presidential campaign, is the widow of the late Sen. Paul Tsongas, beloved in his old House district, particularly in Lowell, the home town he helped revive with the creative use of federal aid. His popularity propelled Niki Tsongas into an early lead, but there was grumbling that her name was her principal asset.

Remind you of anyone? I should offer this first: I'm among those who hold the Tsongas name in something close to a "beloved" status. What I think Dionne misses here, however, is that Paul Tsongas never won a single vote in Massachusetts (save for the 1992 Dem Primary) since 1978. That's a lot of new voters who have never once pulled a lever for a Tsongas to re-acquaint themselves with the brand. And at the end of it all, Niki Tsongas performs marginally better than Deval Patrick did in the district as he was on his own way to a landslide win. Considering the nature of open contests (not to mention special elections with considerably lower turnout), there's nothing terribly shocking about the outcome performance on Tsongas' part.

There may yet be something to make of the cross-party resonance on the issue of immigration. I'm just not sure Dionne offers the best narrative on it.

SIDENOTE: For a more mathematical take on the primary polls out lately, Pollster offers an encouraging case for "inevitability." Having seen both Obama and Edwards make the point that Howard Dean was kicking tail in the polls around this time four years ago, I think a clearer-minded analysis would point out that it was Lieberman who led the early round, with Dean overtaking him during the course of the campaign. Thus far, not one of the challengers has really even made a move - well, there was the Richardson boomlet ... but seriously - and there's more than a little bit of Obama money dropping on TV ads. That it's had absolutely zero effect is a devastating bit of reality to contend with ... and a welcome reminder of the wisdom of not running for President with all of a year in the Senate to your credit.

ADD ON: Of all the people to adequately poke a hole in the Hillary-as-Dean daydream ... Byron York. Still, there's not much in his analysis that's worth disputing.