Cage fight.(2008 II)(Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton)

HILLARY CLINTON came out of New Hampshire a winner--but only because she narrowly avoided being a loser: not the position the world expected her to be in even a month ago. Expect a long, WWF-like struggle ahead.

All of Clinton's weaknesses seemed to catch up with her in Iowa, landing her in third place. Her robotic stump presence was especially off-putting in a retail state. She has been in the national eye for 16 years, and promises a political cycle--Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton--that would be longer yet. It was all right for medieval England to have a dynastic War of the Roses, but modern America? Her effort to say that she had more experience than her main opponents--eight years in the Senate, eight years as FLOTUS--was pitched to the wrong party: Republicans like their old hands, Democrats like to kill them.

Barack Obama, the surprise Iowa winner, was everything she was not. He was young and fresh, articulate on the page and on the stump. He spoke the language of change, one of those uplifting themes that, whether they feed the soul or offer a thought-snack, do satisfy, if only temporarily. The Obama surge was also an unanticipated effect of the Iraq surge: If the war is going well enough to be off the TV screens, then personality and uplift might be more salient.

Obama profited, finally, from his race--not from the votes of blacks (Iowa has hardly any) but from the votes of whites yearning to support a presentable black candidate. This is an honorable impulse, given American history. True, this black man's mother was white and his father was Kenyan, but ethnic political progress in America is often oblique (the first Irish and Italian mayors of ...