Don't do anything you'll regret

Little Snowy River sunrise, New Hampshire. Photo by Dana Clemons.

One of the pleasant things you could do watching the primary results come in in New Hampshire was to think of it as a big nonpartisan primary, since independents can vote in either, and see that not only was Sanders blowing Trump out of the water, as the horserace guys say, but Clinton was beating him as well. This didn't last into the morning's numbers, in which Trump has slipped ahead of Clinton, but they're still pretty close, at 89% of the vote counted:

• Sanders 138,716
• Trump 92,417
• Clinton 88,827
• Kasich 41,813
• Cruz 30,416

And a gigantic preference for what we liberals refer to as optimism, Brooksy, in the top three candidates against all the groaning declinist movement conservatives. Don't stop thinking about tomorrow!

Update: The bad news, from BooMan, is that a lot more Republicans than Democrats came out, suggesting one side is more energized than the other, as in Iowa.

***

Speaking of thinking about tomorrow, beloved commenter Suzan was saying yesterday,

I'm just not sure that November will look like what we think we see now in February.

If Hillary were just another Democratic candidate, that would be a much easier choice. As she seems to have ensured that we all see her as a continuation of Bush's policies toward foreign entanglements and financial shenanigans it gets more complicated to maintain the first assumption. 

I'm absolutely not sure what November will look like. I'm a lousy handicapper (though I once won an $80 Exacta at Belmont) anyway. What I'm concerned with is being ready for whatever happens, by which I mean ready to be an enthusiastic supporter of whichever Democrat ends up on top. Sanders is easy, for obvious reasons, though I'm far from sure he would be the best president (I'm not sure he wouldn't, either). Clinton is, for various reasons, hard, and I'm tending to focus on why you should be ready to support her—not necessarily support her now (Bill de Blasio and Sherrod Brown and Barbara Boxer aren't having a problem with that), but support her then, if need be (as Sanders certainly is prepared to do and will).

It's true that she hasn't always done a great job of presenting herself as a progressive. (She's been especially poor, as Steven Attewell wrote, at showing an understanding of how the Affordable Care Act leads to a European-style universal care system that is in many respects better and certainly more achievable than the Canadian-style single payer approach. Or at pointing out that all these great systems—except for the UK's revolutionary National Health, coming from a true political revolution in the 1945 election—arose by an accumulation of awkward partial solutions not so different from the mess of programs we have been working with since 2009.)

But the idea of her as representing a "continuation of Bush's policies" doesn't come from listening to her; it comes from listening to a critique of her that isn't very well founded, and one I regard as an indirect and deeply unfair attack on Barack Obama, which gets me upset, since what she clearly prescribes is a continuation of Obama's policies, and Obama's revolution is the one I already signed up for.

And when somebody like Corey Robin (in general a wonderful writer and great thinker) writes that the Clinton campaign might be "the most cynical campaign in recent history", because

It’s one thing to walk back your policies on race and crime because the electoral winds are blowing in the other direction. But to pivot so shamelessly from one campaign in which you made war on African America your signature issue to another in which you make fighting racism your campaign brand—simply because you’re losing in the primaries ...—is, well, a little breathtaking

I'm sorry to say I see a significant degree of whitesplaining. It's not a "pivot" from your husband's 1992 campaign to your own campaign 24 years later, it's an evolution (like Obama's "evolution" in favor of marriage equality, where the politician took years to catch up to where the man had always been), and one that the black community (which is not stupid, or politically naive, or monolithic), understands pretty well. The 1992 campaign was among the more cynical in recent history (a defense against George Herbert Walker Bush's far more cynical, skillful use of racism), and African Americans always knew it, and it's a part of their fervent support of Clintonism when and only when Clintonism is supporting them to recognize it for what it was. Now, as the electorate has grown up on racial issues, she feels she can afford to be less cynical than Bill was then. It's offensive to black people and Latinos, in my view, to suggest that Hillary is deluding them.

Actually that's not a bad place to stop for now.

Christie: "We leave New Hampshire without an ounce of regret." Hey, I didn't bring up the weight issue, he did.

Update: And when Robin describes the Sanders victory in language from Edith Wharton—

The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests

—he should note that it's not a very auspicious reference, to a young man in a chilly ghost story who runs away from a life-and-death moral challenge and ends up frazzled somewhere in the Malay Peninsula.

Update: Charles Blow on 'splaining.