Lessons from New Hampshire: Inevitability Loses

I was having a creepy feeling all day Monday and Tuesday last week when there was such a sudden and confident inevitability to Barack Obama overtaking Hillary Clinton and putting her out of the Democratic race. It seemed way too volatile to be true.

As an artist, a spiritualist and a lifelong terminal optimist, I have never been able to shake a propensity towards riding the wave of something changing for the better. But when the "upset" happened and Hillary beat Obama, it felt like an appropriate reality check. If I was thrilled that his Iowa win meant she was not inevitable, I also saw that her New Hampshire win meant he wasn't either.

What's wrong with inevitability? It has the sting of cynicism masquerading as reality. We do know that death and taxes are inevitable, but pretty much everything else is not. The New England Patriots are not inevitable to have a perfect season: anything could happen in a single football game. And anything can move voters in a variety of positions inside the voting booth. No Monday morning quarterbacking will ever figure out exactly what turned the pundits into embarrassed dimwits by Wednesday morning.

Inevitability takes us all off the hot seat of having to wrestle with decisions. If no one has anything locked up because of a high stakes "machine", all the better for democracy.

When we just don't know how the primaries will turn out, it means we have to turn out at the voting booth and choose, and if we're lucky, we'll have clear cut guidelines, and this year the Democrats probably can't lose. Obama has less baggage, but Hillary's has already been exposed. I think the battle against political cynicism has been won---inevitability loses. That's real democracy working.