Iron My Shirt

The discrepancy between the polls and the actual results in the New Hampshire primary is historic. Everyone is trying to explain how it happened.

One fascinating bit of evidence is that exit polling suggests the big difference between Iowa and New Hampshire was in the way women voted: they went in much higher proportion for Hillary Clinton in the second contest.

This suggests that the pivot point that turned the Clinton campaign around may not have been Hillary’s teary-eyed moment, but an incident at another rally when two hooligans disrupted a talk with a sign and a chant of “iron my shirt.” Hillary observed in response, as the protesters were bundled off, that she was running to break through the old glass ceiling and to end sexism. The crowd loved it. Standing ovation.

Women may have felt driven, after that, to vote for her. And women are the majority of the electorate. In a democracy, a sane person does not pick a fight with the majority.

But the moment seemed too good for Hillary, frankly, to be true. The heckling too obviously helped instead of harmed her. And it turns out, indeed, that the thing was almost certainly staged. The perps have now been identified as two young men who work for a Boston radio show. So they may have done it as a publicity stunt; then again, one of them apparently had a “Hillary for President” sticker on his carrying bag. The media are overwhelmingly Democrat by voter registration… And isn’t this just a small step beyond planting audience questions, something Clinton’s campaign has already been caught doing more than once?

Others note that Hillary seemed remarkably well prepared with her comeback, which went on for some time. And not only that—the chants of the demonstrators seemed to be picked up clearly by a microphone. That seems unlikely in normal circumstances. And when the disturbance began, Clinton asked that the lights be turned on so it could all be better seen.

Have a look at it all for yourself here.

It smells funny to me.

"Iron my shirt?" When was the last time you heard anyone express a sentiment like that, even in private?