As I write this, CNN has just projected that Clinton will win New Hampshire.

Eight days ago, this would not have been remarkable at all. Clinton was the anointed queen, after all. She was considered the most experienced candidate, the most electable, and Iowa was full of old white folks who would never elect a young(ish) black guy... right?

But then Iowa happened, and suddenly Obama was "the change candidate," the harbinger of a brilliant nonpartisan future. Suddenly the race was wide open, Obama was more electable, less status quo, more... hip? His mantra of "hope-change-bipartisanship" repeated ad nauseam was suddenly an asset, not a liability.

Polls showed him locked with Clinton in a dead heat, and then he was beating her by ten points. So what happened?

As a embattled Clinton supporter, I would like to think that it's because voters decided she would be a better present after all. But that doesn't seem to be the case. I spent a few minutes (okay, maybe almost an hour) poring over exit poll data on CNN, out of sheer amazement and a desire to procrastinate my philosophy paper, and this is what I found:

First, Obama supporters are younger, richer, more optimistic, and less likely to be Democrats. They don't mind the war in Iraq as much as Clinton supporters do, who are older Americans and tend to feel screwed over by the economy. Clinton has more female support, but even among men, she does better among those over 50.

The idea that the recently-villainized "establishment" is poor, old, and angry (read: John Edwards' people?) aside, I was most struck by another statistic. Voters who decided their vote more than a month ago chose Clinton, 40% to 31% -- no surprise there. Among those who decided in the last week or last three days, Obama won overwhelmingly, 43 or 40% to Clinton's 27 and 36%, respectively. But here's the funny thing: voters who decided their vote today chose Clinton, 40% to 37%.

Is this because of the moment when she shed a single tear during a constituent breakfast, shown yesterday? A moment of weakness, some called it. A moment of post-feminism: "Hillary Clinton cries? Really?" Because here's another funny statistic: the 16% of voters who prioritized a president "who cares about people" chose Hillary over Obama in a two-to-one margin.

For those of us who never doubted that Sen. Clinton was anything but another human being, the possibility that she edged past Obama because of single emotional lapse is a little depressing.

UPDATE: And here I thought I was being original. Apparently Maureen Dowd agrees with me, in less flattering terms. Perhaps I got it wrong, after all: what's depressing isn't that so many voters needed to be convinced by a tear than Clinton was human, but that so many
people were sure it was, yet again, proof of her political conniving and desperation to get to the White House. Or perhaps she was arrogantly crying for us, the voters, for not understanding how terrific she is.

Really, now? This is the kind of vitriol we usually save for Republicans.