Last night–that is, at 1:30 in the morning–I ran into a top Hillary Clinton adviser at the bar in the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, New Hampshire. She was beaming. Earlier in the day, she had said to me, “I’m just praying the spread is 9.9 percent”–meaning she was hoping that Barack Obama would not win by double digits. Well, that was then. Joking, I said that I could imagine Clinton sending Mark Penn, her chief strategist, a telegram that said, “Stop. Come back. Stop. All is forgiven. Stop.” Her eye opened wide and she exclaimed, “Oh, I hope not.” Clinton’s narrow victory in New Hampshire, she said, was not a vindication, but a warning. “We still need to retool,” she explained. “This is not over.” Clinton would have to change plenty from here on: be more open to the media, not be so over-handled. New Hampshire, she added, had been a near-death experience for Hillary Clinton. “We need to learn from our mistakes,” she said. This aide was hoping for big changes within the Clinton campaign. Will that come? I asked. “You never know, politics can be unpredictable,” she said with a smile.
