The NY Times:

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York rode a wave of female support to victory over Senator Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday night. In the Republican primary, meanwhile, Senator John McCain of Arizona revived his presidential bid with a Lazarus-like win.

Talk about hyperbole. Before I’m through you’ll see that freaking Lazarus was mainstreamed more than even Fred Thompson.

Mitt Romney keeps plodding along in second, but that’s a perfectly safe spot to win from if the other two keep trading first and third. Reporters are fools if they continue to dismiss him at this early stage.

And the Dems, oh yeah the again divided Dems…

USA Today:

Clinton won in New Hampshire by tapping into the Democrat’s blue-collar roots, carrying voters with no more than a high school education and those with incomes below $50,000 a year. Obama carried better-educated voters and those who were independents.

Still, the road ahead is tough. Surveys of voters leaving the polls here showed Clinton losing to Obama among moderates, independents and first-time primary voters. He beat her 2-to-1 on who could best unite the country and came close to her on “most qualified to be commander in chief.”

Pollster Anna Greenberg says voters under 30 are 17% of the electorate, almost as big a chunk as the 20% who are seniors. Clinton’s claim of being a “seasoned veteran” doesn’t suit many of them. “They like outsider candidates, truth-teller candidates,” says Greenberg, and have gone in the past for independent or third-party candidates such as Jesse Ventura, Ralph Nader and Ross Perot.

New Hampshire was staggering from job losses when Bill Clinton ran in 1992. “Under his administration things got so much better. People remember that. He’s very popular,” says Kathy Sullivan, a former party chairman who co-chaired Hillary Clinton’s campaign here. “The ’90s weren’t bad. The ’90s were pretty good. Eight years of peace and prosperity was a pretty good thing.”

Some voters worry that Obama’s idealistic goals — ending the war in Iraq, creating a new green economy and providing health insurance for all Americans — will founder on the shoals of Washington politics. “We don’t want another Jimmy Carter,” said Larry McCoy of Amherst, N.H., said as he waited in line for a Clinton rally. “He was a bright guy, too. He was a fresh face. Everybody went for him after Nixon. But he didn’t know how things worked.”

So Clinton carried the blue collars, the base Edwards has targeted. It appears that he still faces a discrimination that gets little mention anymore: distrust of Southerners.

And now progressives have to wrestle with the unknowable: is it smarter to abandon Edwards for their second choice of Hillary or Barack, or maintain support, hope for a breakthrough or a brokered convention?

When I cited Gloria Steinem’s editorial earlier, she made the point that older women are more radical. I think she only has half of the story on that point. I’m an older guy and I’m more radical, too. Not for white guys but for those politicians challenging status quo economic classism, because that’s where me and much of my family lives: below the median.

I can speak for no other. I’m staying with Edwards as long as he’s in it. I’ve said since 2004 that I cannot find any benefit to the country by electing Hillary, and I still need convincing from Obama if he gets the nod. Based on all I witnessed in the blogosphere in the past two days, I expect to see an awful lot of pressure brought to bear on Democrats’ choices from here on out, with plenty of name-calling going down. If others want to do that to me, claiming I’m sexist or racist or whatever, have at it. I’m perfectly comfortable with my conscience and choice and I feel no need to make any defense of either. Edwards is the first candidate to rank as high with me as any major party candidate since 1972, so I have to let my heart remain my guide. There’s still a chance I won’t vote for the top of the ticket at all depending on who other Democrats make the nominee.

Call it what you want, but the rancor I saw demonstrates to me that many Dems are still willing to rip each other up to make a point that matters most to them, so a divided party is heading to Election Day once again. That’s cool, too. I vote Democrat when they have someone decent. When they don’t, I move left from there. I’m just as stubborn as any other partisan, but I don’t call them names or push any buzzword buttons. I’ve been dumped on the bottom of the country before: the Republicans don’t scare me no matter who they elect. I’ll always be as free as Bobby McGee.

And how did things go for the Republicans?

Political analyst Charles Cook called McCain’s victory “the greatest comeback since Lazarus” and attributes it to “an enormous vacuum in the Republican Party.”

in November, polls indicated Americans would be least likely to elect an atheist or gay person President. Nearly as low was someone as old as McCain. That’s how weak the Republican field has turned out to be.

And now they’ve found true love.

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