If you're a student of American history, you will recall the famous headline on the front page of the Chicago Tribune the day after the 1948 election. "Dewey Defeats Truman," the newspaper told its readers.
Of course, the headline was wrong, and it has been the rallying cry of underdogs ever since. Most of the time, underdogs have achieved that status for a simple reason. They're underdogs. And most of them don't win. But sometimes they do.
And those occasions are considered "upsets." Whether those upsets are truly Trumanesque is for history to judge.
Tuesday was one of those rare occasions when the underdog won. The setback in Iowa had rendered the "inevitable" Hillary Clinton extremely vulnerable. And she was the underdog to Barack Obama in New Hampshire, according to several polls.
But with 95% of the Democratic ballots counted, Clinton has 39% of the vote. Obama has 37%, and John Edwards finished third with 17%.
It's not exactly on the same level with Truman upsetting Dewey 60 years ago, but if Clinton can string together a few more wins like this one, it will start to move into that territory.
For the most part, though, I think the outcome signals something else. It signals that both Clinton and Obama are going to have to work for this nomination. The Democrats aren't ready to just hand their nomination to someone without talking about it first.
So we may be in for a bit of a roller coaster ride before the Democrats start to settle on one of their choices.
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