Hard to believe that at one time the Iowa Caucus was the kickoff to the presidential campaign, isn't it? It seems as if the campaign has been going on ever since John Kerry took his $14 million in leftover campaign cash in November 2004 and went home before the vote count was even certified.

There isn't much to say about the Republicans, other than the near-historic collapse of Mitt Romney, who spent a mint of money in Iowa and lost to Elmer Gantry. There's a certain "chickens, home, roost, etc." feeling I have about Huckabee's win; that he is the Frankenstein monster created by the Republican Party's embrace of the most lunatic fringe of the religious right for so many years. The party hackocracy has always been able to keep the flat-earthers in the fold by giving lip service to their values and then virtually ignoring them in the arena of actual policy. In Huckabee, they have Their Guy -- a guy who talks life where blastocysts are concerned, but brags about how many people he killed as governor; a guy who says wives should submit to their husbands and then frees a rapist because his victim was distantly related by marriage to Bill Clinton; and a guy who thinks the earth was created in six days just as it is today by a Big Alpha Male in the Sky. The few mainstream Republicans left are appalled at this, but they have no one to blame but themselves. They put up with this for years; now they have reaped their just rewards.

On the Democratic side, all I can think of is that ModFab is one happy guy this morning, and if he weren't such a good and generous soul, he'd be perfectly within his rights to be smug as hell. Apparently we were at the wake when Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow were running things at MSNBC, and I wasn't about to watch Brian Williams and Pumpkinhead, so instead we alternated between Air America's coverage (which included the intelligent and learned David Bender trying mightily to cut into Mark Green's obvious spinning for Hillary Clinton and The Odious Lionel being far better than he is on his own show) and the Sammy Cam.

This was a HUGE win for Obama, one in which he was the choice of half of voters under 45 and 57% of those aged 17-29. Despite the perception among everyone born after 1964 that the baby boom generation has a sense of entitlement to all the marbles in perpetuity, any progressive boomer with half a brain knows that even if the candidate you supported didn't win (and mine didn't), that first-time caucusgoers showed up in droves and voted for a candidate that gives them hope for the future is great, great news. The political process has become so cynical, and the processes of government have become so debased, that the sound repudiation of the corporatist Hillary Clinton by young voters last night is wonderful to behold, and the enthusiasm of those young Iowa voters who caucused for the first time last night and those from out-of-state who went to Iowa to spend their Christmas break going door-to-door to stump for Obama is something that should be nurtured and encouraged to carry over into other states and into years to come.

In February of last year, Bill Maher asked John Edwards, "Since your competition is Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, mainly, do you think it's unfair baggage that you're a white man?". It was a joke, of course, but for all that Edwards has been channelling Paul Wellstone this year, and for all that before all this started, the Democrats were touting Mark Warner as the Great Southern White Hope for 2008, there does seem to be a strong desire this year to do a soft-storm of the Bastille and move away from anything that smacks, however remotely, of the Washington cesspool of the last seven years. And despite his message, the fact remains that John Edwards is still a Southern White Guy, and no matter what he runs on, you can't tell in five seconds of television imagery that he DOES represent something different.

Watching Edwards speech last night (which at one point veered dangerously close to Howard Dean's misrepresented rally from 2004 with its litany of states), his studied avoidance of words like "victory", and his (from what I could see) framing of the night's results as a resounding message of change, I had the sense that before this is all over, one way or another, Edwards and Obama are going to be able to do business. Whether it's a one-two punch one way or the other; or some other kind of good cop/bad cop relationship, my sense was less that Edwards is believing he's going to win this thing, and more one that he's bound and determined to continue the message right through February 5 and possibly beyond. For John Edwards, this is less about an Edwards presidency than it is about putting an end to the corporate control of the United States Government, and that ultimately he's not going to care how it gets done as long as it does.

Ezra Klein, who despite looking twelve years old on television is rapidly becoming one of the smartest political analysts around, has this to say:

Barack Obama won tonight, but, in a sense, John Edwards' campaign also triumphed. The progressivism of the race, the focus on ideas, the courage of the Democrats -- all were products of his early example. He began the campaign by talking about poverty, announced his candidacy in the mud of New Orleans, set the agenda with the first universal health care bill, and closed Iowa speaking of the uninsured. This is Barack Obama's victory, and it's richly deserved. But Edwards, running as a full-throated populist, set the agenda and finished second, ahead of the Clinton juggernaut. He said his role was to speak for the voiceless. He now barrels towards New Hampshire with ever more volume. And while his shot at the nomination is long at best, his candidacy, even if it fails, will have been far more successful than most.

This is not to say that he's out of this thing; that he squeaked by ahead of Hillary Clinton, who has far more money and far more media coverage, shouldn't be underestimated. Even Time regards his second-place finish as a boost:

John Edwards went into the Iowa caucuses last night a fighter and he emerges from them as scrappy as ever. In other words, don't assume, because he lost to Barack Obama, that Edwards is down for the count. After all, as his campaign advisers are quick to point out, by finishing second Edwards's David can claim victory over at least one Goliath. "The person hurt in all this is Hillary Clinton," Joe Trippi, an Edwards senior advisor, told TIME minutes after his candidate claimed the silver medal in Des Moines. "The former president of the United States flew all around this state and so did she. They outspent us three-to-one at least. And we beat her."

[snip]

All that's now left to decide, said Jonathan Prince, Edwards' top strategist, is what kind of change the country wants. "Are we going to have a philosophical version of change, or are we going to have a fight to bring about the change we really need?" Prince asked in a rhetorical flourish meant to contrast philosophical change (Obama) with the real thing (Edwards). Edwards' populist message has focused on stamping out the power of corporate greed in Washington, and he argues that Obama's Kumbaya inclusiveness cannot get that job done. "Asking lobbyists to simply give up their power by asking them? In whose world? Not in the real world. That is a complete and total fantasy, it'll never happen," Edwards told a crowd in Ames Tuesday.

I suspect we're going to see younger journalists sounding the death knell of baby boomer politics in Hillary Clinton's third place finish. But I think that it says far more about how wrong the punditocracy is that suddenly Hillary Clinton, after fifteen years in which they regarded her as the yokel from the hicks who wasn't fit to eat off of Nancy Reagan's dishes, became the shoo-in, the anointed nominee, by virtue of having been in Washington for a decade and a half; and that they were 100% wrong all along.

Even if Obama isn't your first choice, there IS something terribly exciting -- and hopeful -- about the fact that a black man named "Barack Hussein Obama" was the first choice of a predominantly white population in a flyover state in a post-9/11 world. Even the fact that Mike Huckabee, as much of a willfully ignorant, theocratic moron as he is (and arguably the Mirror Universe version of Bill Clinton, a theory for which Lower Manhattanite makes a compelling case), won on the Republican side is a hopeful sign that perhaps we are getting past the reptilian-brain mindset that too many Americans have had over the past six years; one fed by the media and right-wing politicians, that Killer Muslims are Coming To Get Us™ and that this fear should occupy our every waking moment. I'm not saying that there aren't very real dangers in the world, but it's clear by now that the Bush/Cheney/Giuliani methodology of attack first and ask questions later is one that no longer resonates with the American public, no matter how many right-wing talk radio hosts and TV talking heads try to perpetuate it. I'm not saying that Huckabee's win is a good thing; I'm with tristero in that I think that in a group of utterly batshit crazy Republicans, he may be the most dangerous of all. But his victory in Iowa, I think, is less about evangelicals in that state and more about the fact that "Vote for me or die at terrorists' hands" isn't resonating the way it used to be.

I'm still not sold on Obama being tough enough to fight effectively back if he's the nominee and the Republicans start painting him as a Muslim spy who's also a cocaine addict. I still think he's frighteningly naïve about the reality of today's Republican Party, whose goal is not just to crush the opposition, but crush it, mangle its corpse, then have sex with it, then cook it and eat it with fava beans and a nice chianti for dinner. I still think that he vastly overestimates the feasibility of consensus with greedy corporate executives who are loath to see their taxpayer-funded gravy train derailed. And I'm troubled by his use of right-wing framing on issues from Social Security to trial lawyers. There is a kind of incipient Joe Liebermanism in him that troubles me.

I've heard some Obama supporters say that I needn't worry, that this is just how he sheathes the sword before applying the death blow, and I suppose we can always hope. But while hope may be enough for young voters who haven't lived through the assassination of their generations' heroes (and I hope they never have to) and watching their hopes of what America can be dashed time and time again; you can't blame the rest of us for saying "I'm from New Jersey....show me."

However, I AM willing to be shown.

Labels: 2008 election, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards