The University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Political Science
The Science, Technology, and Society Initiative (STS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP)
The Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP)
Keynote Speakers Richard Rogers, Professor in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and Director of govcom.org. Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University, the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the School of Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA.
Approach The Program Committee encourages disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches rooted in political science, media studies, and communication scholarship. The JITP Editor strongly endorses new and experimental approaches involving collaboration with information and computer science scholars. Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:
- citizen initiated campaign videos, - candidates' use of YouTube, - bloggers use of YouTube to influence the primaries or election, - the impact of YouTube on traditional or new media coverage of the election cycle, - the effect of YouTube on citizen interest, knowledge, engagement, or voting behavior, - social network analysis of YouTube and related election-oriented sites, - political theory or communication theory and YouTube in the context of the 2008 election, - new metrics that support the study of the "YouTube Effect" on elections, - archives for saving and tools for mapping the full landscape of YouTube election content, - use of YouTube in the classroom as a way to teach American electoral politics, or - reviews of existing scholarship about YouTube.
Paper Submissions Authors are invited to prepare and submit to JITP a manuscript following one of the six submission formats by January 7, 2009. These formats include research papers, policy viewpoints, workbench notes, review essays, book reviews, and papers on teaching innovation. The goal is to produce a special issue, or double issue, of JITP with a wide variety of approaches to the broad theme of "YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States."
How to Submit Everything you need to know about how to prepare and submit a strong JITP paper via the JITP web site is documented at http://www.jitp.net. Papers will be put through an expedited blind peer review process by the Program Committee and authors will be notified about a decision by February 15, 2009. A small number of papers will be accepted for presentation at the conference. Other paper authors will be invited to present a poster during the Friday evening reception. All posters must include a "YouTube" version of their research findings.
Best Paper and Poster Cash Prizes The author (or authors) of the best research paper will receive a single $1,000 prize. The creator (or creators) of the best YouTube poster/research presentation will also receive a single prize of $1,000.
Conference Co-Chairs Stuart Shulman, University of Pittsburgh Michael Xenos, Louisiana State University
Program Committee Sam Abrams, Harvard University Micah Altman, Harvard University Karine Barzilai-Nahon, University of Washington Lance Bennett, University of Washington Ryan Biava, University of Wisconsin Bob Boynton, University of Iowa Tom Carlson, Åbo Akademi University Andrew Chadwick, Royal Holloway, University of London Greg Elmer, Ryerson University Kirsten Foot, University of Washington Jane Fountain, University of Massachusetts Amherst Jeff Guliati, Bentley College Mike Hais, Co-author, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics Matthew Hale, Seton Hall University Justin Holmes, University of Minnesota Helen Margetts, Oxford Internet Institute Mike Margolis, University of Cincinnati Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts Amherst John McNutt, University of Delaware Andrew Philpot, University of Southern California-Information Sciences Institute Antoinette Pole, Montclair State University Stephen Purpura, Cornell University Lee Rainie, Pew Internet & American Life Project Jeffrey Seifert, Congressional Research Service Mack Shelley, Iowa State University Charlie Schweik, University of Massachusetts Amherst Chirag Shah, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill John Wilkerson, University of Washington Christine Williams, Bentley College Morley Winograd, University of Southern California Quan Zhou, University of Wisconsin-Stout
‘The wars against terror have begun, but it will take some time before the nature and composition of these wars are widely understood.’ So argues Philip Bobbitt, a senior advisor to both Republican and Democrat administrations for decades and Professor at Columbia University, in his new book Terror and Consent. We are experiencing a war on terror, but there will be more. This is not simply in light of the expected wars over energy and water in the coming century, but because of a fundamental change in the nature of the state and the communications environment it operates within. Put simply, when states exist, as Bobbitt says they do now, to empower individual citizens and private and third-sector organisations to create economic and social value through global, decentralised networks, then they also create the template for the very form of terror that will strike back against them. Through history, each state has indirectly shaped the nature of terrorists that have attacked it, and today’s ‘market state’ triggers a mirror image response from global, decentralised networks like Al-Qaeda. The wars and terrorist groups of the twentieth century were made possible by – and were a reaction to – the twentieth century nation state. But that state has gone. As long as the twenty-first century is governed by market states, we can expect more wars on terror.
Bobbitt calls for a fundamental re-think of the relation between strategy and international law so that we have a common framework for dealing with these wars, just as the twentieth century witnessed a particular legal framework for dealing with wars between nation-states. This implies, however, new forms of regulating communication, and on this he is less specific. It is the very diffuse, emergent character of communication today that makes it difficult to get a grip on what is being regulated. This thing, ‘communication’, does not stand still long enough for regulators to comprehend what they are trying to regulate. Last week’s attempt by Viacom to get Google to hand over the details of anyone who has ever viewed Youtube demonstrates this. Bobbitt’s ostensibly reasonable attempt to harness state conduct of war within law (to avoid any repeat of the abuses the current war on terror has produced) could be used to justify unreasonable control of our communications by states.
Given that researchers at the NPCU are producing analysis of jihadist media and the current battles for consent and legitimacy between Al-Qaeda, other jihadist groups, and Western states, we might seem well placed to explain the role of communication in the generation, prosecution or hopefully avoidance of future wars. But it is imperative that far-sighted thinking about law, the state and war should be accompanied by equally far-sighted thinking about communications. One cannot work without the other.
One of the best papers I saw in the whole web 2.0 conference held at Royal Holloway a few months back was given by Dr Helen Kennedy. Helen spoke about how people with learning difficulties were being excluded from the web and designers gave little thought as to how to structure websites in such a way as to make them useful and accessible. It was certainly a very thought provoking session.
For that reason I was thrilled that Helen's work was featured on Channel 4 news yesterday. I do have to declare a slight interest (the report was put together by a Channel 4 researcher who is a friend of mine) but they did a really great job.
[Brightcove videos seem to really upset squarespace, so here's the link].
Today was Bill Gates's last day at Microsoft. Gates's achievements were manifold, but I think - come the melt down of every PC on the planet, global warming, or even armagedon - one will endure and continue to annoy for eternity. All together now: "You look like you are trying to write a letter...".
If you liked that, you might also like this and this (but be warned, the language is a bit rude).
Further to my previous comments, David Davis's team have done a lot of work on this website, which is now considerably better. It has a donate online button (still a little bit too tucked away, I would suggest) and a blog which is being frequently updated and allows commenting.
Davis had just published a press release claiming to have a great deal of support from small donors. The sum given is £40,000. This is impressive, but too few details are given for the "small donor" claim to be truly meaningful. I have left a comment on his blog requesting more details.
In the US election, small donors have been hugely important for both Barack Obama and the Ron Paul campaign, and they seem to be a really positive trend, so this press release and the possibility that British politics might see a small dollar funded campaign is a really positive thing. But on the back of that, can I ask two questions:
1. How do you define small donors? In the US they have a very definite cut off point, which is $200 (the point above which where individual donors details - name, address, etc - have to be reported to and published by the Federal Election Commission).
2. Also, the Obama campaign has published the total number of individuals who have actually given them donations, as this necesserily increased transparency. Would you be interested in following suit, as such an action would seem to fit with the grassroot powered ethos you are trying to engender in your campaign.
[I have crossposted this blog post on my research centre weblog, which examines political communication online:
Few things in politics shock me any more, but last week's events in Westminster were simply breath taking (here is a typical reaction). David Davis's decision to resign from his parliamentary seat and contest the resulting election on the issue of 42 days is one of the biggest political surprises in recent years. It is still not really clear how this is all going to pan out and whether Davis, Cameron or Brown will be the big winner (or loser) from these events.
The early stages of the contest lead to two observations. Firstly, there does seem to be a huge divide between the established wisdom of political commentators and those who comment on these events on blogs and message boards. For an example of this, look no further than Nick Robinson's newslog. Robinson broke the story of Davis's resignation and, in his original post, played up the angle of a division between the outgoing shadow Home Secretary and the leader of the opposition. Within a matter of hours, comments were appearing all over the board attacking Robinson - he was buying Labour spin, he was failing to recognise Davis's bravery, he didn't understand just how angry the electorate were over 42 days, he represented "politics as usual" (indeed the attacks were so vitriolic Robinson wrote another blog post justifying his position). A similar pattern occurred on the message board and on other blog.
There is clearly an interesting conflict going on here, but I suspect two things are happening. Firstly, we are back to the old chestnut of how unrepresentative people who comment on politics online are, if only because they disproportionately care about politics, relative to the rest of the voting population. For this reason, I suspect the commentators are ultimately right - Davis might have harmed the Conservatives long term political calculations, which are aimed at looking like a viable government in waiting and winning a majority in a general election. At the very least, it is one hell of an unnecessary risk when plan-Cameron looks to be going perfectly. But, this leads me to my second point - Davis's maverick behaviour is tapping into a genuine sense of anti-politics, which seems to reject smartly packaged, strategic calculation. And that is why it is attractive to a lot of people online.
Such feeling would seem to provide fertile for an Internet campaign, especially since Davis has said that he going to fund the election from individual donations to his cause. It was today that he launched his website... and what a missed opportunity! There is, right at the bottom, a tiny donation link (you could really miss it if you weren't looking very hard). This is what you get if you click on it:
If you would like to support David by making a donation to his campaign, you can do so by making cheques payable to:
‘Haltemprice & Howden Conservative Association Fighting Fund’
Send them to 32 Main Street, Willerby, East Yorkshire, HU10 6BU
Last Call for Program Committee Volunteers - Please reply directly to stuart.shulman@gmail.com if you are interested in joining the Program Committee.
DRAFT - Call for Papers - DRAFT
"YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States" April xx-xx, 2009
A two-day conference jointly hosted by: The University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Political Science The Science, Technology, and Society Initiative (STS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences The Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP) The Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP)
Keynote Speakers Day 1: Richard Rogers, University of Amsterdam, Director, govcom.org is a Web epistemologist, an area of study where the main claim is that the Web is a knowledge culture distinct from other media. Rogers concentrates on the research opportunities that would have been improbable or impossible without the Internet. His research involves studying and building info-tools. He studies and makes use of the adjudicative or 'recommender' cultures of the Web that help to determine the reputation of information as well as organizations. The most well-known tool Rogers has developed with his colleagues is the Issue Crawler, a server-side Web crawler, co-link machine and graph visualizer.
Day 2: Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University, the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the School of Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA. He is the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University. He is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in communities. Specifically, his research team is developing and testing theories and methods of network science to map, understand and enable more effective networks in a wide variety of contexts including communities of practice in business, science and engineering communities, disaster response teams, public health networks, digital media and learning networks, and in virtual worlds, such as Second Life.
Approach We welcome both disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches rooted in political science, media studies, and communication scholarship. The JITP Editor strongly encourages new and experimental approaches involving collaboration with information and computer science scholars. Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:
- citizen initiated campaign videos, - candidates' use of YouTube, - the impact of YouTube on traditional or new media coverage of the election cycle, - the effect of YouTube on citizen interest, knowledge, engagement, or voting behavior, - political theory and YouTube in the context of the 2008 election, - new tools and metrics that support the study of the "YouTube Effect," - the use of YouTube in the classroom as a way to teach American electoral politics, or - reviews of existing scholarship about YouTube.
Paper Submissions Authors are invited to prepare a manuscript following one of the six JITP submission formats by January 10, 2009. These formats include research papers, policy viewpoints, workbench notes, review essays, book reviews, and papers on teaching innovation. The goal is to produce a special issue, or double issue, of JITP with a wide variety of approaches to the broad theme of "YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States." Authors of accepted papers will be notified by March 1, 2008.
How to Submit Everything you need to know about how to prepare and submit a strong JITP paper is documented at http://www.jitp.net/. Papers will be put through a blind peer review process and authors will be notified about a decision by March 1, 2008.
Best Paper Prize The author or authors of the best paper will receive a single $1,000 prize.
Conference Chair Stuart Shulman
Program Committee Sam Abrams Ryan Biava Bob Boynton Andrew Chadwick Jane Fountain Jeff Guliati Matthew Hale Justin Holmes Mike Margolis Andrew McCallum Toni Pole Stephen Purpura Jeff Seifert Mack Shelley Charlie Schweik Christine Williams
It's been a while coming but I had my first interview with the International Affairs Forum, the online journal of the Center for International Relations in Washington. I was talking about my research on new Web technologies and international terrorism. Check it out and let me know what you think of it.
[I've been writing this on and off in spare moments since Saturday, so apologies if it is a bit stream of consciousness like].
Wow. After nearly a year and a half it is finally over. The most remarkable political contest I have ever seen for sure, and I would venture to argue the most amazing thing seen in American politics since at least 1968, if not more. After that, it seems quite likely the general election itself will be something of an anti-climax. But now seems a good moment to offer some provisional and very sketchy answers on how the whole thing turned out the way it did. I'm not alone in this undertaking. Today's papers were littered with pieces analysing the outcome (here, here and here for a few) and Daily Kos (here, here, here and here for some examples) has been running a symposium on just this subject.
The first thing that came into my head was what to call this post. The original version is the unbracketed title above, namely "why did Hillary lose?". I added the additional bit because it seemed a little unfair not to acknowledge Obama's achievements. But, despite all of BarackObama's manifold political achievements, it does seem more compelling to focus on Hillary Clinton, as her candidacy fits neatly into a broader story - an epic story at that - about the Clintons and the generation they are a part of. In this sense, her campaign is part of a curve in American politics that starts with the spike in birthrate in the postwar period, and continues as that generation has its political consciousness shaped by the Vietnam war and the events of 1968. 2008 might mark the last chapter in forty year journey, the end of what Obama refers to in the Audacity of Hope as "the psychodrama of the baby boomers". In the shorter term too, we only need to go back about a year and it would have been hard to find more than a handful of commentators arguing anything other than Clinton's inevitability. Undoubtedly, something did go horribly wrong for her campaign, even though Obama skilfully exploited the opportunity it presented.
So here is my, very provisional list of thoughts (and I also have to give a hat tip to my friend Jon, who I had email exchange with on this subject a few months back which has done a lot to shape my views on the question, although the decision as to which arguments to include and how to phrase - and thus their shortcomings - are entirely my own). Just before I begin though, I want to make one more point. I don't believe their was a mono-causal reason for Hillary's defeat. For that reason, I reject arguments such as that articulated by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times: "She didn’t lose because she was a woman. She didn’t lose because America isn’t ready for a woman as president. She lost because of her own — and her husband’s and Mark Penn’s — fatal missteps." I think this misses the point. Hillary's defeat and Obama's victory was a perfect storm, bought about my a multitude of factors. Change any one of them and it is possible to conceive a different result. With that in mind, here we go (ideas are sketched into headers, with other key points highlighted).
The war. I'm sure history will judge this as being hugely important to Hillary's defeat. It was, but a big caveat need to be thrown in: I'm pretty sure she still could have won with it hanging round her neck. But it had three significant impacts. Firstly, it gave Obama his opening. Because he'd opposed the war from the beginning, in contrast to any other candidates in the race, he could use this stance to justify his position in the race. Secondly, the war vote allowed older doubts about the Clintons on the more radical wing of the Democratic Party to solidify and create hardened opposition. Thirdly, and finally, many of the networks and communities which Obama was able to exploit, were created in the aftermath to the Iraq war on blogs and Democratic-supporting websites. This was especially important to Obama's fundraising success. Which leads neatly too...
The Internet. The Obama campaign got it, as did many of their supporters. If you've been following the campaign over at TechPresident this much is quite clear (as Micah Sifry suggests in his post-primary season essay on the subject). As the famous Apple / Think Different video illustrated the power of a creative commons approach to campaigning. I do think the really important thing to grasp though is the Obama campaign was in reality a hybrid. It harnessed the best bits of Howard Dean's open source mentality for sure, but in its ruthless approach to data-management it also borrowed heavily from the Bush campaign in 2004. It success was found in a combination of collective activity, open source campaigning and information management. The most obvious example of this can be seen in fundraising, which simultaneously managed to be very centralised (as anyone on the Obama email list will know - messages were posted perfectly in synch with campaign events) but also relied on a decentralised network to publicise and galvanise supporters. In many ways, the great achievement of the Obama campaign was appreciating that these two approaches to politics were not mutually exclusive.
Fundraising. I mentioned fundraising above. But really... fundraising. Obama's success (and for that matter Clinton's, at least in comparison with everyone else ever to compete in a primary other than BarackObama) was mind blowing. But two points. Firstly, it did have an impact. In 2007, Obama's money making made him look viable. Later on, it made it look possible that he might achieve the holy grail - being able to opt out of general election, as well as primary season, state funding. Secondly though, fundraising (or more specifically the power it gave Obama to buy lots and lots of TV advertising) had a pretty negligible impact. In many of the late primaries, Obama outspent Clinton 3-to-1. And it had no impact on the voting blocs and who they supported.
This was a change election. I've seen this written so many times, and I'm still not really sure what the term means - especially when John McCain is still polling somewhere north of 40 per cent. Clearly not everyone in the US thinks it is a change election. But it is also true that there is a sense - after Iraq, Katrina and economic slow down - of real Bush fatigue. A bigger and academically-grounded theme, bought out in Michael Hais and Morley Winograd's book Millennial Makeover, is the idea that the US is in the middle of one of its recurring political realignments, wherein political power shifts from one generation to another. It is this idea that brings us to the concept of post Baby boomer politics and also might explain Obama's support from younger voters. If that is the case, newness was good. Hillary ran as an incumbent. Because the electorate were not happy with the status quo, Hillary's decision to dwell on her experience and the nineties was a big mistake (not least because this raised fears of dynastic politics - Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton anyone? Although a voxpop with a young voter on this subject a few months back came up with my very favourite line of the whole election: "We're for Obama. We don't want royal families. We don't want Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton. We want Obama. He's our Robert Kennedy". Ahhh, the irony). Of course, this might have made sense in 2004. It might have even made sense if there had been no Obama. But with the fresh-faced nearly shop new Senator from Illinois in the race, it was a dreadful error. Aside from his perennially popular anti-war statement, Obama had virtually no history for people to judge him on. As a result, voters were able to project all their political desires onto him. Clinton backers might have asked "what the hell does hope actually mean?" - but failed to figure out the real problem. It could mean anything voters wanted it to, especially in the early stages the campaign when Obama was running strongly as a post-partisan candidate.
Hillary had all the disadvantages of being the establishment candidate, but not all the advantages. Despite the fact that she ran as an uber-insider, Hillary didn't actually gain all the benefits one might have expected to from this position. While she got a good lead in super-delegates early on it was far from decisive, and she got little help from the party establishment later in the race, when the likes of Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi did a lot of harm to her campaign, while remaining technically neutral. Other senior Democrats, most notably Ted Kennedy openly came out and endorsed Obama. Why did this happen? I suspect it was because, despite their political successes, the Clintons was never really true party insiders. They were certainly not liked when they came up to Washington in 1992, and despite his political recovery culminating in re-election, Bill Clinton was never able to do much to help Democrats down the ballot running for other offices. And maybe senior Democrats were wary of a return to the Clinton dramas of the nineties. The support the Clintons gained early on was largely due to their power. When that power began to ebb, then so did the support. In contrast, the fact she was seen as a Washington insider killed her.
2004, 2006 and 2008. I think one also needs to look at the circumstances of previous elections in order understand the collective decision making processes at work in the Democratic Party this time around. In 2004, they rejected Dean and instead went for the safe option of Kerry, and look where it got them. 2006 was a different story. They fought across the country and bought their opposition to the war front and centre... and won out (this lesson shows something of a capacity for partially remembering history, of course - the Democrats chose plenty of centrist candidates during that election, and they lost the most ideologically charged contest in Conneticut). But these two electoral experiences seemed to give the Democrats a taste for risk taking.
Sectional voting patterns. This really was an election in two parts. Although it seems a long, long time ago now, Obama was originally spoken of as the candidate who was going to unite people, regardless of race, gender, class or even political leanings. The first crack appeared in this edifice when Clinton won the New Hampshire primary and the Nevada caucus - in New Hampshire, women turned out to vote for her, while in Nevada it was noted that, despite support from major labour unions, Obama was not getting the support from Hispanics. This took us into a second electoral phase, were support for both sides was frozen and largely predictable. By super Tuesday, the super-voting blocs, almost evening matched in size were arranged against each other. On Obama's side, there were African Americans, upscale voters and young people. On Hillary's side there were women, traditional working class Democrats and Hispanics. And it pretty much stayed that way for the next four months (for a good and detailed account of electoral coalitions, check out this set of Real Clear Politics essays on the subject - this is part one, use the links at the top to access the other three parts). Only rarely, as occurred at Wisconsin for example, was either side able to break through. By and large, we could have guessed every primary result from Super Tuesday through to the end with what we knew about voting patterns that had occurred up to that point. It just so happened that Obama's coalition was a little bit bigger, and he was better at mobilising it (especially in caucuses) than Clinton's was. This leads me to one of the more controversal points I want to make...
Hillary didn't go negative soon enough. I'm sure many will disagree. But I think a good argument can be made that Clinton didn't go negative at Obama early enough. Lets be clear what I mean by this. I don't mean some of the more brazen nastiness that has (rightly or wrongly) been linked with the Clinton campaign (such as this or this ). I mean a more deliberate and systematic attempt to question Obama's experience and wisdom, and compare it with Clinton.
This is most famous ad of the campaign, and it does exactly that. However, it was only deployed before the Texas primary. Although it may have helped in that campaign, it wasn't enough to get Clinton to prevail overall. The reasons, I think, is that sectional voting patterns had already become really solidified. People judged the argument through the prism of already being strongly supportive of a candidate - in other words, they saw what they wanted to see: inexperienced Barack verses level headed Hillary, or an evil Clinton hatchet job. Which leaves me asking: what would have happened if this ad had been deployed before these patterns had developed? Would the 3am ad have even been as a negative ad? After all, it focuses on Hillary's skills. It was only negative in Texas because she was in a one-on-one run off with an opponent who she was trying to label inexperienced. I think the root cause of this problem was very simple - in December or January, when this ad might have made a difference, the Clinton camp were simply not taking Obama seriously enough to think about running it. If one wanted to go a bit deeper into the dark art of politics, there is also a question as to whether the Clinton people were doing their op-research well enough. Why, for example, did they not turn up the Reverend Wright clips? When these did come out, they were certainly a problem for Obama (and might still prove to be a problem for him in November). But his primary coalition was, by this time, solid enough that it barely budged in response to the flap. Had this story come out in January, things might have been very different.
Heisenberg uncertainty principle. In particular, the idea that act of observing something changes its behaviour. This worked at two levels in this campaign. Firstly, the Clinton campaign was built on established wisdom from politicians, journalists and academics (yes, I got it mindboggling wrong too). Momentum was everything. The campaign could not go on beyond Super Tuesday. It might be over in Iowa and New Hampshire if a candidate could score two clean wins. For that reason the campaign planned insufficiently for small states and contests after Super Tuesday. That would cost them during Obama long run of wins in February and March. In contrast, the Obama people didn't buy this idea. They understood it was a contest about delegates, where Clinton's momentum could be offset by racking up large wins in small states. Secondly, the observers themselves - the press - proved to be a vital constituency. It is probably going to far to say they were Obama's base (Clinton after all had some big cheerleaders in the national media), but they helped his cause a lot.
Also a shoutout for Saturday night live, who seemed to really hit the right note a few times during the course of the campaign.
The electoral system. Clinton was unlucky in one major respect. The electoral system did not help her one bit. A key element here was the order of the primaries. Had one of "her" states voted straight after Super Tuesday instead of all being six weeks later, things might have been very different. Secondly, it is hard to imagine two states that could have caused Hillary more problems by discounting themselves than Florida and Michigan. Of course there is lots of internal state politics involved, but I wonder would have happened had it been, for example, Washington State and South Carolina that had moved themselves up?
Cock ups. Bad luck on the rules cannot excuse some serious cock ups on behalf of the Clintonistas. The biggest mistake she made was an inability to handle caucuses. And the anti-established wisdom excuse holds no water here - her campaign should have known that insurgent candidates always do well in this form of competition, because they have a motivated support base. There is also (frequently verified) story of Mark Penn not understanding the rules of the California primary. In the last weeks, the Clinton campaign became fond of arguing that, under a winner takes all system, they would have won. True enough, and this contest has demonstrated some problems with a proportional system. But the Obama people factored proportionately into their strategy - they knew that winning small states big was as good or better than winning big states small.
Sexism and race. Aside from the drama of the whole contest, future historians will undoubtedly focus on an historic election which pitted the first viable African American candidate against the first viable female candidate. This had unfortunate consequences. At times there have been very unseemly conversations about whether blacks and women were historically sinned against to a greater degree and which group "deserved" the presidency first. I certainly don't want to enter into these, not least because I think it starts an argument that can't be won. But I do accept a point Peter Tatchell made last year about different forms of discrimination and prejudice. They aren't equal, either in their absolute outcomes, in their acceptability or the impact they have on our political culture. This manifested itself in a number of ways. I was pretty shocked as to how people (rightly) spoke of "Obama's historic candidacy" but neglected to mention "Hillary's historic candidacy", which, like her or hate her, it undoubtedly was. I suspect this was because people were so familiar with the former First Lady and got used to the idea that she would win the nomination last year; on that basis it didn't capture their imagination in the same way. I also think it is fair to say that people are much more touchy about race than they are about gender - racial jokes for example, have a complete red line around them, gender, not so much so. I don't think we can quantify the impact this had on the race, but it certainly changed the narrative of events. The issue of race also gave Obama one huge advantage - he could make an amazing speech on it, and gather the plaudits. Obama deserves a lot of credit for the speech and its content, but the issue of gender did not and never could afford the same opportunity to look statesman (or stateswoman) like.
There is one more interesting point to be made about race and gender. Obama's candidacy generated intellectual unity across the generations of African American supporters, ranging from old style civil rights activists such as Jesse Jackson to younger, professionals. In contrast, Clinton's candidacy cut to the heart of the division between second-wave feminists (who tended to support her) and younger post-feminists, who were more likely to go for Obama, or at least regard the Clinton candidacy as a far less important struggle. So this division was not just generational, but intellectual (as this excellent Slate piece outlines). Obama didn't have to contend with a division like this.
Human interventions. Finally, two people deserve special mention. I suspect we don't really know the impact of Bill Clinton on this election. Before hand, he was regarded as a huge asset to Hillary. Then, in South Carolina, it all went a bit wrong for him. And throughout the campaign, he intermittently caused problems. But he was also did a lot of quiet campaigning, especially in the rural parts of later states that might have proved decisive. I suspect he did damage her on occasions, but without him, she would have had to drop out sooner. And secondly, John Edwards. Obama owes him a big thank you. Whether intentionally or not, he was a huge help. Iowa might have turned out very differently without him running, and Clinton could have run Obama a lot closer. He also dropped out at just the right moment for Obama, when the latter was firmly established as the major anti-Clinton candidate and needed to coalesce his support.
