Dispatch

We Regret the Error

By Jennie Rothenberg Gritz

Image credit: Jewel Samad/Getty Images

Will Hillary Win the Nomination? (July/August 2005)
by Washington Insiders

A few months after Bush’s second inauguration, we began setting our sights on the 2008 election. It was difficult to say, at that point, who would win the next Republican nomination, but when we polled a group of Washington insiders, they seemed fairly certain who the Democratic candidate would be. “If Hillary runs, Hillary wins—simple as that,” one Democratic respondent wrote. “She is beloved in the party from the grassroots to K Street,” opined another. “It would take a cataclysmic failure on her part to lose the nomination.” A Republican participant elaborated: “No one on the Democratic side has the star power, the money, or the message that Hillary has.”

We can’t exactly blame these seasoned pundits and campaign managers for overlooking a certain Illinois senator who had just arrived in Washington a few months before. Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention had enlarged his profile, and his memoir Dreams From My Father had climbed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, but he hardly seemed ready to eclipse a Clinton.

Even knowing all that we know now—the victory in Iowa, the endorsement from Ted Kennedy, the throngs of cheering Berliners—it’s difficult to look back and pinpoint exactly how a relative newcomer bested the longtime party favorite. Perhaps Andrew Sullivan provides the answer in “Goodbye to All That,” his 2007 essay on Obama’s unexpectedly compelling candidacy: “Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary.”