Mulling it over, I’d say the primary results, whatever their other defects, had a commercial logic about them. It’s not in New Hampshire’s interest, as the first primary state, merely to endorse the verdicts of the Iowa caucus. All that ensures is that next time round candidates drop more dough in the Hawkeye State and less in NH. Indeed, from New Hampshire’s point of view, the priority is to marginalize whatever it is those cockamamie caucus types have come up with. They certainly did that: Mike Huckabee feels very last Thursday this morning; if anything, he has negative bounce; and even NH evangelicals split Huck-McCain.

From New Hampshire’s point of view, the second priority is to destabilize the media narrative, because the media narrative is by definition an attempt to impose a national storyline on what NH regards as an in-state event. They accomplished that, too, by declining to prostrate themselves before the Obamessiah.

Incidentally, I think Derb’s point may have something to it – that Obama’s loss in the Granite State owes something to the difference between the secret ballot of a primary system and the public vote of a caucus. I’m not saying New Hampshirites are racist. Quite the opposite. If anything, in a public caucus, the pressure is to fall into PC line and not vote against the first mainstream viable black candidate. But in the privacy of the voting booth, if you look at Obama in non-identity-politics terms, he seems a pleasant fellow who talks almost exclusively in gaseous platitudes. As Andrew Cline points out below, for upscale white liberals at Dartmouth College that’s enough. For other Democrats, it wasn’t. I wouldn’t make any assumptions about South Carolina.