It was no surprise to Hillary watchers like me that the New York senator managed to squeak by her chief rival, Sen. Barack Obama, in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday. With a behemoth machine behind her – and who knows how many dead people casting votes – the most astounding thing was that the junior senator from Illinois did so creditably, not only winning the Iowa caucus a few days earlier but also nearly eclipsing Ms. Self-Proclaimed Experience in the Granite State – two of the most lily-white states in the union – and only losing to her by a measly two or three points.

In thanking the people of New Hampshire, Hillary announced that because of them, “I have found my voice.” Say what! After 16 years on the national scene and being a senator from the state of New York for over six years, she has just now found her voice? Gimme a break!

Actually, it was because of that very voice – the gamut of which ranges from strident to pedantic to patronizing – and its effect on normal human ears, that had virtually every pollster and pundit predicting a “blow-out” for Obama – to such a degree that I think it’s safe to suggest either that (1) no one, ever again, take either polls or pundits seriously, or (2) the highly-suspicious results of the election be investigated.

After all, this would not be the first time in Hillary’s political life that strange things happened at the ballot box – in her favor, of course.

Remember New Square? When Hillary was running for her senate seat in New York in 2000, she knew she needed the formidable support of the state’s Jewish voters, who were still smarting from her kissing Suha Arafat after the terrorist’s wife had just accused the Israeli government of causing rising cancer rates in Palestinians. The Orthodox and Chasidic communities – bedrock-conservative to the core – were particularly resistant to Hillary’s brand of liberalism and had consistently given her über-conservative predecessor, Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, 98 percent of their vote.

But New Square had a problem. Four of its most prominent residents had been convicted in 1999 on 21 charges of conspiracy, embezzlement, and wire and mail fraud, sentenced to lengthy jail terms, and ordered to pay back millions of dollars to the people and institutions they had defrauded.

Hillary met with Rabbi David Twersky, who was trying to win the release of these crooks, and shortly after the meeting – as if by magic! – New Square officials began to campaign for her throughout Rockland County (where several Orthodox communities, including New Square, are located) and a Yiddish newspaper endorsed her. A few weeks later, she and the president met with Twersky in the White House.

Guess what happened on Election Day? Hillary carried New Square, 1,400 to 12. Naturally, the widespread irregularities – including more than 24 cases of village voters who were not legitimately registered – were never investigated. And it certainly didn’t hurt that Vito Corleone –oops, I mean Bill Clinton – used the power of the presidential pardon to commute the criminals’ prison sentences.

This was not the only craven thing the ex-president did to garner votes for Hillary’s senate race. To win the Latino vote, he also pardoned 16 members of the FALN, a brutal Puerto Rican terrorist organization that had planted over 130 bombs in the U.S., killing six people and injuring 70.

As writer JT Thompson has written in American Daily, “When Hillary runs for President, she’ll no longer have Bill to cut pardon deals for votes, but you can be sure she’ll be scheming and cutting other deals for votes to return to the White House.”

Which leads to the question: How could every poll and every pundit be dead wrong in their prognostications and analyses, not for any of the other candidates, but only for Clinton and Obama? Were dirty tricks at play?

As my e-mail friend – a classical musician, libertarian, and professor – Lenny Cavallaro says: “Polls have indeed been wrong, but this result stinks.” 

Cavallaro writes that, “apparently, Hillary did best in the areas of New Hampshire that used the Diebold voting machines – the same machines that are easily hacked, the same that Bush critics said helped `steal’ the election in Ohio in 2004. Isn’t it strange that in 57 percent of the precincts – constituting 40 percent of the electorate – that used hand-counted ballots, Obama won handily?”

Bev Harris, the founder of Black Box Voting, an organization opposed to the touch-screen voting machines, has said that the Diebold system is dangerously inadequate when it comes to stopping election fraud, and that the optical scan machines used in 55 percent of New Hampshire precincts – representing more than 80 percent of the state’s voters – are “the exact same make, model and version hacked in the Black Box Voting project in Leon County (Florida)” a few years ago. They haven’t been upgraded; the security problems haven’t been fixed.

And Robert C. Koehler of Tribune Media Services writes:

Before we get too enthusiastic about feminist solidarity or wax knowingly about New Hampshire Democrats’ traditional soft-heartedness toward the Clinton family, let’s ponder yet again the possibility of tainted results…most of the media can’t bear to remember that all the problems we’ve had with electronic voting machines – and Diebold machines in particular, which dominate New Hampshire polling places – remain unsolved.

Did the Hillary campaign really defy the pollsters? She had been trailing Barack Obama by 13 percentage points, 42 to 29, in a recent Zogby poll, as election watchdog Brad Friedman [www.bradblog.com] pointed out. And the weekend’s “rapturous-packed rallies for Mr. Obama,” as the New York Times put it, “suggested Mrs. Clinton was in dire shape.”

So when she emerged from the Tuesday primary with an 8,000-vote and 3-percentage-point victory over Obama, perhaps – considering the notorious unreliability not to mention hackability of Diebold machines – the media might have hoisted a few red flags in the coverage, rather than immediately chalk the results up to Clinton’s tears and voter unpredictability.

According to innumerable sources of credible data, the hand-counted votes overwhelmingly favored Obama, while the Diebold votes favored Hillary. Here is but one breakdown from www.legitgov.org:

Hillary Clinton:            Diebold Accuvote optical scan            39.618%
                                    Hand Counted Paper Ballots                         34.908%

Barack Obama,             Diebold Accuvote optical scan             36.309%
                                    Hand Counted Paper Ballots                         38.617%

Machine vs Hand:
Clinton:                                                                                     4.709% (13,475 votes)
Obama:                                                                                     2.308% (-6,604 votes)

And what about the New Hampshire resident who called Rush Limbaugh’s radio show on Wednesday to say that the parking lots in the polling places were filled with cars with out-of-state license plates, and that in New Hampshire anyone can go into any polling place and announce that he or she wants to vote, the only requirement being to state the intention to move to the Live Free Or Die state “at some point in the future"?

In addition to some very real questions about the legitimacy – or manipulation – of the vote, I suspect that Hillary’s upset victory was also the result of two set-ups. The first was the question asked of her at the debate at St. Anselm College in Manchester about her “unlikeability” factor.

Pouting coyly, Hillary said: “That hurts my feelings.” Apparently, this ploy was focus-group-tested and found highly effective.

How to follow up? Play her ace-in-the-hole – the victim card. Lower the volume, get a little Tammy Wynette crack in the voice, and manufacture a semblance of teary-eyed emotion.

As Michelle Malkin described it: “The steely voice – infamous for uttering profanities at staffers, state troopers and her Secret Service detail, bellowing at the Bush administration and Rush Limbaugh, and imitating a fiery Southern drawl – turned drippy…So long, feminist hero. Hello, weeping willow.”

NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that, “there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up.” Dowd cited a reporter who covers security issues cringing: “We are at war,” he said. “Is this how she’ll talk to Kim Jong-Il?”

Then there was the “35-years-of-experience” card Hillary played so relentlessly. As writer Burt Prelutsky has noted: “The woman was born…in 1947. That means she is 60, and that 35 years ago she was 25.The year was 1972, and she was nothing more or less than a law student at Yale. Is she really so deluded that she actually believes Americans were somehow listening in on her conversations in the student union?”

Indeed. Hillary’s claims of “experience” are totally bogus, as are her preposterous declarations that she will be “ready from day one” to conduct our foreign policy. She bases these myths on the fact that she is married to a man with genuine experience – however objectionable – in governing the state of Arkansas and being president of the United States. Clearly, Hillary has all along been alluding to her 35-year, move-heaven-and-earth obsession with becoming the president of the United States!

Now the same pundits and TV blatherers who got it all wrong on Tuesday are trying to deflect attention away from their own failures by talking about Obama’s loss as a function of the so-called Bradley Effect, in which white voters – in an election that pits a white person against a non-white – tell pollsters they are undecided or plan to vote for the non-white, but then vote for the white person in the privacy of the voting booth. Examples include Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s run for governor of California and Douglas Wilder’s run for governor of Virginia, among several others. In all cases, as in Obama’s, polls showed them leading, sometimes significantly, but ultimately losing.

Yet that argument falls apart when you consider Obama’s stunning win in Iowa. But it appeals to the mostly-liberal chattering class because it allows them to lament – self-righteously, I might add – about “racism” in America.

In the end, the combo of faux tears and false claims worked for Hillary. Now, those of us who view her as a manipulative, power-obsessed, even dangerous, leftist must abide her through the primaries to come. It won’t be easy.

Unless an investigation is undertaken, we may never know the truth about the New Hampshire vote. But having watched the Clintons and their toadying minions over the past 16 years, I smell a rat!