The slandering of New Hampshire began even before all the ballots were counted. On Election Night, Anderson Cooper pressed his panel of political analysts to buy into his speculation, which ran like this: The privacy of the voting booth freed New Hampshire voters to act on their latent racism, denying Barack Obama the victory the weekend polls had guaranteed.

At the time, the CNN team was trying to overcome its befuddlement over the disappearance of the story all the media had anticipated. Until the numbers grew beyond doubt, the commentators resisted them. Then they began to speculate on how Hillary Clinton could possibly have won such a stunning victory.

It was in this context that Cooper raised the issue of racism in the New Hampshire electorate. John King, one of the CNN commentators pushed back, but Cooper persisted.

I was so mad I turned the channel to Fox.

But, of course, Cooper was only the first to float this canard.

Larry Sabato, a Virginia political scientist who makes a good living as a political expert, told the Monitor's Dan Barrick that Obama's race might have cost him votes that polls couldn't accurately measure. He based this on a theory that some white voters tell pollsters they support a black candidate because

they might otherwise be viewed as racist. Chris Matthews loved this theory, or purported to, and repeated it endlessly.

Even Andy Kohut of the Pew Research Center fell into line. "My guess is that Mr. Obama may have posed less of a threat to white voters in Iowa because he wasn't yet the front-runner," Kohut wrote in the New York Times. "Caucuses are plainly different from primaries."

Well, this is indeed a guess. It has no basis in fact. But it does make racism among voters a scapegoat for pollsters who overstated the meaning of their polls and journalists and would-be journalists who were determined to "report" the outcome of an election before the voters had even voted.

As for Sabato's theory, as applied to New Hampshire, it is preposterous. Voters here had a rich choice of candidates in both parties. Why would they feel any need to prove they were not racist by falsely telling pollsters they supported Obama?

Surely there were New Hampshire people who rejected Obama because he is an African-American. But there were also voters who chose him at least in part because of his race.

Clinton found herself in a similar situation. She probably faced as much prejudice as Obama did. Some people hated her and others would never support a woman as commander-in-chief. To others, her gender was an asset.

Tuesday's outcome was stunning, but it was stunning because pollsters and journalists told the public one thing and the opposite happened. Plenty of plausible explanations for this upset do not resort to phony theories or reckless guesses about racism. To his credit, Obama himself rejects the racism charge.

By Election Day, the country's insular national political class had pulled itself - and the rest of us - into a story line that seemed immutable. The Iowa bounce had opened a double-digit lead for Obama over Clinton. Once such a bounce occurs toward the end of a campaign, it only gets higher.

In this age of nonstop media talkers who are not really journalists, there is a great premium on reporting what's happening before it happens. When reality upsets their conventional wisdom, they have some explaining to do.

But don't expect mea culpas. It couldn't be that they misread or oversold their own data. Certainly it wasn't that in their closed world they were so tuned in to each other that they weren't listening to voters.

And if they themselves were blameless, the problem must lie with some aberration - some dark secret - of New Hampshire voters.

In retrospect, what Clinton did right toward the end is pretty clear. Fighting for her political life, her campaign reached for another gear. Clinton knew where to find votes. She had told the Monitor that a big part of her constituency was people who need something from government. Her campaign had the ability to get that vote out. (next page »)