 |
| Image credit: Natty Harnick/Associated Press |
March 31, 2007: First fund-raising deadline passes. Barack Obama looks like a serious threat.
MATTHEW YGLESIAS: Clearly, eight years of increasing levels of progressive political mobilization and progressive institution building, combined with three candidates who each have strong appeal, are able to produce a vastly expanded pool of donations from what was out there in 1999. (April 2, 2007)
 |
| Image credit: Robert Spencer/Getty Images |
July 10, 2007: John McCain’s top advisers quit, campaign left for dead.
MARC AMBINDER: As long as a candidate has a national platform and a state, he’s not dead. Reporters came to Concord today to cover a funeral, and what we found instead was a juiced-up candidate who doesn’t really need journalists to give him a second life. (July 13, 2007)
 |
| Image credit: Stephen Morton/Getty Images |
July 23, 2007: In the Democratic YouTube debate, Obama says he would meet controversial foreign leaders “without precondition.”
ANDREW SULLIVAN: You know how much I hate to say this, but [Clinton] destroyed the opposition tonight: out-classing it, out-debating it, and avoiding the usual pitfalls. I wish it weren’t so, but it’s what I saw. If she keeps this up, it’s hers.
MATTHEW YGLESIAS: Clinton articulated a position of continuity with her husband’s administration, while Obama was hinting at a more drastic departure. (July 24, 2007)
 |
| Image credit: Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press |
August 11, 2007: Mitt Romney wins, Mike Huckabee comes in second in Iowa straw poll.
ANDREW SULLIVAN: Ultimately, this is a very good result for one person, and one person only: Mike Huckabee. He may not be my favorite candidate (I totally disagree with him on social issues, and he is more big-government than me), but he deserves kudos for pulling off what he did today.
 |
| Image credit: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images |
October 30, 2007: At a debate in Philadelphia, Clinton gives a confusing answer on whether she supports granting driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. Her opponents pick up the scent.
MARC AMBINDER: For a solid hour, the Democratic presidential candidates ganged up on Clinton, and her vote in favor of the Lieberman-Kyl resolution served as their cri de coeur … Her strategic ambiguity on Social Security still sounds puzzling, and her defense of Eliot Spitzer’s proposal to provide illegal immigrants with driver’s licenses—oh wait, was she defending the approach, or the idea of dealing with the issue? The debate was not supposed to end this way!
 |
| Image credit: Jonathan Wilson/MCT/Landov |
November 5, 2007: Ron Paul raises more than $4.2 million in a single day, largely through online donations.
ROSS DOUTHAT: Ron Paul actually is an extremist, insofar as he holds positions that are way, way outside the Beltway mainstream. And his (admittedly limited) successes hint at an Internet-enabled future in which, for good or ill, a hundred ideologically diverse flowers can bloom—or at least run ads in New Hampshire. (November 6, 2007)
ANDREW SULLIVAN: Whatever happens in this race, Paul’s candidacy has already provided a focus for all of those conservatives who despise the big-spending, unchecked-executive, busybody, Christianist wing of the GOP. And all those liberals who know that a new politics—centered around individual freedom and global peace—needs to be born. (November 6, 2007)
 |
| Image credit: Darren McCollester/Getty Images |
November 28, 2007: Reports surface that Rudy Giuliani may have billed obscure city agencies for his police detail to escort him to the Hamptons for flings with his mistress while he was mayor.
MATTHEW YGLESIAS: Looks like it’s time to say “9/11!” some more. I’m sure it’s relevant somehow. (November 29, 2007)
 |
| Image credit: Ben Sklar/Getty Images |
December 6, 2007: With anti-Mormon tracts proliferating on the campaign trail, Romney speaks on his religion.
ROSS DOUTHAT: The [upcoming] speech should have been given at the very beginning of the primary season, or after Romney won the nomination; it doesn’t make sense to give it in response to Mike Huckabee’s rise in the polls. (December 3, 2007)
MATTHEW YGLESIAS: All of this meshes with Romney’s disgusting efforts to unite all people of faith under the banner of excluding atheists entirely from his account of virtue. (December 7, 2007)
January 3, 2008: The Iowa caucuses—Obama, Huckabee triumph, and Clinton, Romney are in danger.
James Fallows: To watch [Obama’s] statement live was to realize, even as it was happening, that you were seeing a moment of history people were likely to remember and discuss for a very long time. (January 4, 2008)
ANDREW SULLIVAN: This black man won an overwhelmingly white vote in Iowa. Whatever else happens, he has made history tonight. And he deserved every single vote.
January 8, 2008: New Hampshire primary—Clinton survives, somehow, declares she has found her voice; McCain wins and begins comeback.
MARC AMBINDER: CLINTON CAME BACK!!
MATTHEW YGLESIAS: The temptation to massively overreact to the last thing that happened is something I warned about during the Iowa-N.H. interregnum, and the same is true today.
 |
| Image credit: Don Heupel/Associated Press |
January 7–26, 2008: Racial tension builds; Bill Clinton calls Obama’s narrative about his Iraq record a “fairy tale” and compares Obama’s South Carolina primary victory to Jesse Jackson’s.
MARC AMBINDER: Race and gender have always been subtexts of the Democratic presidential race, and for the first time, really, since this whole thing began, they’ve become fully fledged texts. (January 11, 2008)
ANDREW SULLIVAN: The tactics of the Clintons in this primary season have some striking resemblances to those used by the other dynasty [the Bushes] when challenged from below. (January 20, 2008)
January 19–29, 2008: South Carolina and Florida primaries—McCain, left for dead a month before, looks likely to wrap up the nomination.
MATTHEW YGLESIAS: McCain wins. Let the lovefest begin … Whatever else happens in 2008, one thing that’s certain is that Rudy Giuliani won’t be elected president. That’s something I’m thankful for. And, based on the results, I think it’s something that virtually everyone in America can be thankful for.
ANDREW SULLIVAN: A McCain nomination means one thing for sure. The era of legal, authorized torture in America is coming to a close.
ROSS DOUTHAT: Much of what’s happened to make McCain the presumptive nominee has been luck, pure and simple. (January 30, 2008)
 |
| Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images |
February 5, 2008: Super Tuesday leaves Democrats in a draw; McCain takes a commanding lead in the GOP race.
MATTHEW YGLESIAS: Clinton won, but most indications are that she won’t have won nearly enough delegates to put this thing out of reach. Now the landscape gets much more favorable for Obama. (February 6, 2008)
 |
| Image credit: HillaryClinton.com |
February 29, 2008: Hillary Clinton airs “3 a.m.” ad.
MARC AMBINDER: Perhaps the most provocative ad Hillary Clinton has run this cycle … Arguably, this is her best … argument … against Barack Obama, and yet it’s taken her 13 months to make it so explicitly.
MATTHEW YGLESIAS: The question becomes, who do I want picking up the phone—the candidate who voted for invading Iraq, or the other one? … While I’d like to have experienced hands at the levers of power, what I’d really like is a president who has good ideas and the courage to stand up for them.
March 4, 2008: Clinton survives in Ohio and Texas; McCain clinches as Huckabee withdraws.
MATTHEW YGLESIAS: It looks pretty clear that the NAFTA/Goolsbee/Canada imbroglio wound up hurting Barack Obama quite badly. And in many ways, deservedly so; it was an embarrassing and amateurish way for a campaign to behave. (March 5, 2008)
March 18, 2008: With the media obsessing over his pastor’s provocative comments, Obama delivers a speech on race in America.
ANDREW SULLIVAN: This searing, nuanced, gut-wrenching, loyal, and deeply, deeply Christian speech is the most honest speech on race in America in my adult lifetime. It is a speech we have all been waiting for, for a generation. Its ability to embrace both the legitimate fears and resentments of whites and the understandable anger and dashed hopes of many blacks was unique in recent American history.
April 4, 2008: McCain speaks in Memphis, on the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
MARC AMBINDER: Those who gathered in the rainy, muddy parking lot of the Lorraine Motel did not expect this presidential candidate to show up. “Boy, he has some stones,” one young woman said, as an organizer announced McCain’s name.
May 6, 2008: After votes in Indiana and North Carolina, the Democratic primary looks less and less competitive.
ANDREW SULLIVAN: Here’s what now seems obvious: African American voters killed the Clinton candidacy. It is a fitting end to the Clintons’ campaign and an almost Shakespearean coda to their career. (May 7, 2008)
 |
| Image credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images |
June 3, 2008: Final primaries—Obama clinches the nomination, and the three candidates speak in turn on TV. Clinton drops out on June 7.
ANDREW SULLIVAN: If the contrast tonight between McCain and Obama holds for the rest of the campaign, McCain is facing a defeat of historic proportions.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/10/first-pass-the-post/6978/
