Thoughts On The Iowa Caucuses

Democrats: Barack Obama (38%), John Edwards (30%), Hillary Clinton (29%), Bill Richardson (2%), Joe Biden (1%), Chris Dodd 0%, Mike Gravel 0%, and Dennis Kucinich 0%

Republicans: Mike Huckabee (34%), Mitt Romney (25%), Fred Thompson (13%), John McCain (13%), Ron Paul (10%), Rudy Giuliani (4%), and Duncan Hunter (1%)

Of course, if you'd relied on the BBC, then you'd have been forgiven for not knowing that there was a Republican Caucus at all.

Anyway, here are a few thoughts.

Democrats:

If Clinton doesn't win New Hampshire, then she's finished. She could never have won the Presidency, anyway: far too many people cannot stand her.

Obama (although he deserves better than for the New York Times to run a front page picture of Clinton) would be slaughtered in a televised debate with a former Governor or a former Mayor of New York, and in any case 2008 is not shaping up to an American year of plenty like 1960, when a charismatic idealist could be chosen, first as candidate and then as President, over a hardheaded realist.

Perhaps the East Coast and London media should stop mentioning that Obama is black, since it didn't seem to bother anyone in Iowa. Or did it? His attraction might well be that he is not African-American in the sense that Jesse Jackson meant when he coined the term. And that might well anger a lot of people who are (a lot of whom don't like the products of twentieth-century, legal and more-or-less socially respectable, race-mixing). Imagine if the Republican nominee had a black running mate?

A ticket which appeals only to the core of one's own core is electoral suicide. Clinton-Obama? Obama-Clinton (which she'd turn down)? You simply cannot be serious. The Republicans could run a pair of pumpkin pies and beat that.

So, all in all, a very good night for John Edwards. Which is a very good night in itself.

Republicans:

Why does my spell check already recognise the word "Giuliani", but not "Huckabee" (or "Obama")?

Huckabee's victory is a cause of unalloyed joy, because he is really a Democrat. He is a Democrat who believes in the six-day creation, but there used to be a lot of them, and there probably still are under the surface. (Bush is also a creationist, of course.) He is a Democrat who opposes abortion, who defends marriage as only ever between one man and one woman, and who upholds Second Amendment rights.

But when many or even most Democrats were like that, there were generations of Democratic dominance, making possible exactly the sorts of things that really do mark out Huckabee, incontrovertibly, as a Democrat: creating jobs, relieving poverty, extending and defending workers' rights, that sort of thing.

Since turning into shibboleths abortion, the homosexualist agenda, and the restriction of gun ownership to government functionaries and criminals, the Democrats have driven away great swathes of exactly the people who made them the party of Main Street rather than Wall Street. That Huckabee is running as a Republican demonstrates this more starkly than anything else yet.

Huckabee is not, by the way, a "former Baptist minister". He is still a Baptist minister, and I for one rather like the idea that he might nevertheless occupy the reserved presidential pew in Saint John's Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square. It would be rude of them not to invite him to preach occasionally, which would be nothing if not memorable for all concerned. (He is a "former" Governor of Arkansas, but that is never mentioned. Funny how Bill Clinton wasn't treated like that.) Of course, he would destroy his own base, and possibly even bring an Independent into the race, if his running mate were either a social liberal or a Mormon. If his running mate were from the black churches, on the other hand...

Huckabee also believes that it is not for America to try and export her political institutions around the world. What's not to like?

Which brings us to Ron Paul, with enough money to run as an Independent if necessary, kill off the neocon war agenda for ever as both main candidates tried to appeal to is supporters, and possibly even send the whole election to the floor of Congress. Imagine that.