However, New Hampshire (Live Free or Die, my foot), is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Boston-to-Washington lib political cartel. The multi-legged fix -- same-day voter registration, late-in-the-day deliveries of (pre-punched?) supplemental ballots, all-day deliveries of in-the-bag out-of-state voters -- was in for Shelob the Spider Queen, so the only decision her handlers had to make was a tactical one, namely, how to frame the win for the greatest effect. On the one paw, a slim win by a supposed shoo-in suggests incipient vulnerability. On the other, an astonishing, unexpected, come-from-behind victory by someone who's been all but written off strengthens her position for the next contest. Everyone who thinks that decision took more than a nanosecond, raise your hand.
So, with the NH outcome a foregone conclusion, they dusted off the old sandbag ploy, a.k.a. playing up today's doom-and-gloom, to make tomorrow's turnaround look even more miraculous. They chummed the water with rumors of Shelob's impending crack-up, tossing in those not-quite-brimming eyes and a sexist heckler or two as a plausible after-the-fact explanation for the voting public's change of heart. And the press corps, predictably obedient as ever, snapped up the chum and swam with it. Oh boy, Oh Bam', did they swim.
The rhetorical question is whether the media -- those self-styled shapers of public opinion -- are even capable of realizing how deftly they were played by the real masters of the game.