Kathy Kiely on the Real Story Behind Obama's New Hampshire Primary Speech

On a recent Wednesday evening Kathy Kiely, USA Today writer and current Mathey College Faculty Member in Residence (she lives in Blair Arch!) had dinner with a group of about a dozen students to talk about the rapidly deteriorating state of print journalism and her own coverage of the November election.

While Kiely spent most of her time discussing the demise of newspapers, perhaps the most interesting moment of the evening came when she told a story from the Obama campaign trail that hasn’t yet been anecdotally beaten to death by the rest of the media. With apologies to Ms. Kiely (she’s a very good storyteller, and this is a mediocre paraphrase at best), here's the real story of Obama's speech the night of the New Hampshire Primary:

After Obama’s victory in the Iowa caucus, Kiely’s editors at USA Today assumed that Obama would win the New Hampshire primary easily and go on to win the nomination (pretty much all the polling data and public opinion was predicting a big Obama victory in New Hampshire). So her editors assigned Kiely to a big profile on Obama that would run after his victory.

Kiely drove from Concord to Nashua on the day of the primary on interview Obama. She went to his hotel room and sat down for the interview. Kiely said she remembered thinking, “Hillary Clinton is out there shaking hands. Why aren’t you?”
More...
She went back to Concord, wrote the story, and sent it in to her editors. Around that time, results were starting to come in, and it was clear that Hillary had won. So, her profile suddenly rendered obsolete, she drove back out to Nashua to hear Obama give his concession speech.

Kiely said that, in her 28 years of covering presidential elections, Obama’s speech that night in New Hampshire was one of the best she’d ever heard. A few months later, having a drink with some of Obama’s speechwriters, she asked about that speech. They told her it was his victory speech; all he’d done is add a line at the beginning congratulating Clinton on her victory.

If you look back at the speech (full text) it certainly looks like a victory speech, especially bold statements like, “when I am president of the United States.” And while past examples to be assertive in loss have not gone very well in the Democratic primaries (see also: Dean, Howard), Obama's "concession" speech seemed to work just fine.