It’s taken me a couple of days to digest what transpired in the New Hampshire primaries on Tuesday. Not the results. The voters came out and made their voices heard by tabbing Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and John McCain (R-AZ) as their favorites in the Granite State.

What has been troubling to me is how the media failed to learn its lesson, not from the 2000 presidential election, but the 2004 election. As many cable news outlets – CNN, MSNBC, Fox and even the networks – took to the airwaves Tuesday evening, every anchor and pundit had the same information: there was a huge turnout on the Democratic side and exit polling was indicating a big win for Senator barrack Obama.

In the 2004 election between President Bush and Senator John Kerry, exit polling available to insiders indicated that Kerry would be the man taking the oath of office on January 20, 2005. I remember watching newscasts throughout the day in November of 2004, where pundit after pundit was talking about why President Bush had failed, without quite saying he had lost. Yet, when all the votes were in fact counted, President Bush had won a fairly solid re-election.

The exact dynamic occurred this past Tuesday. From Brit Hume to Keith Olbermann and every other anchor in between, to pundits from newspapers and talk radio, the narrative throughout the late afternoon and evening was all about the Obama wave. This wave story line was based solely upon information obtained from exit polling…and just like 2004, the information turned out to be wrong.

So what’s the answer?

To their credit, The Politico’s top two scribes penned the mea culpa of mea culpas.

New Hampshire sealed it. The winner was Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the loser — not just of Tuesday's primary but of the 2008 campaign cycle so far — was us.

"Us" is the community of reporters, pundits and prognosticators who so confidently — and so rashly — stake our reputations on the illusion that we understand politics and have special insight that allows us to predict the behavior of voters.

If journalists were candidates, there would be insurmountable pressure for us to leave the race. If the court of public opinion were a real court, the best a defense lawyer could do is plea bargain out of a charge that reporters are frauds in exchange for a signed confession that reporters are fools.

John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei also touch on the 2004 incident I mentioned above:

But the instinct to be even a couple hours ahead of the story is relentless. At The Washington Post, where we both worked, exit polls in 2004 had the newsroom busy working on Why Kerry Won stories—scrapped just minutes before publication as real returns made clear this was not in the cards.

I think the media needs to take a bit of advice that I often give to my five year-old son Matthew. "What's the magic word?" Patience.