Well, Well

Huckabee wins decisively. The screams of despair you hear are coming from “movement conservatives,” neocons and the drown-gubmint-in-the-bathtub, Club for Growth, tax-cuts-uber-alles crowd.

The bobbleheads are saying the New Hampshire GOP primary will be between McCain and Huckabee. Romney is in big trouble. The Giuliani campaign seems to be dead in the water, although there’s still a glimmer of a possibility he could come back.

As I keyboard it’s clear Barack Obama has won the Dem Caucus. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are in a virtual tie for second, but Edwards is staying a dozen votes ahead. Will this (dare I hope?) put the myth of the Inevitable Hillary to rest?

There will be tons of analysis tomorrow. My initial take is that the unprecedented turnout of younger and first-time caucus goers tonight ought to be taken very seriously by both parties. Hillary Clinton’s “experience” is with delivering cautious little mini-tweaks of Republican policies. Also, the economic populist message sold very well in Iowa, especially considering that Huckabee’s campaign leaned more in that direction than did the other GOP candiates’.

There are indications that Chris Dodd will drop out of the race tomorrow, which would be sad, because in many ways I think he’s the best guy running. Other than that, however, I’m happy.

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Also: My technical problems are not completely resolved. I hope the site doesn’t go down again, but for the time being I have to keep comment moderation turned on because I’m getting comment spam by the hundreds per hour, and if I activate the spam filter I’m afraid the site will go down again. I don’t know why that would be so, but I don’t want to take any chances.

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Update: I like this quote, from shamanic:

With Huckabee and Obama apparently winning the Iowa Caucus, I can’t help but think I’m seeing the Democratic Party be reborn into the party of America, and watching the GOP fade to become the party of home schoolers.

It Begins

It’s Iowa Caucus Day. The circus has begun. Gail Collins writes about how absurd the Iowa Caucuses are and why no one should take them seriously. However, they will be taken seriously.

I got a kick out of David “Bwana” Broder’s take on Iowa versus New Hampshire:

That system empowers the activists and those with built-in organizational ties who can mobilize people to leave their homes for a couple of hours on a weeknight and motivate them to declare a public — not private — preference for a candidate.

On the Republican side, those networks belong principally to conservative Christian groups, antiabortion organizations, home-school advocates and some economic interests.

On the Democratic side, organized labor and the teachers boast the best networks, but the main impulse is a broader populist tradition that tugs the Democratic Party of Iowa to the left. That tradition may go back to the days of Henry Wallace, the Iowa-born vice president under FDR. But it has been embodied in recent decades by Tom Harkin, the longtime Democratic senator who ran for president himself in 1992 and quickly fell behind the more moderate Bill Clinton and Paul Tsongas.

Harkin has accustomed Iowa Democrats to a red-meat diet of anti-corporate rhetoric, a tradition he shared with the late Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. That theme was echoed this year and in 2004 by John Edwards and was imitated — with varying degrees of conviction — by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the closing stages of the Iowa race.

It has been an Iowa pattern to tilt the Democratic race leftward and the Republican race to the right. And often it has been New Hampshire, where the primary turnout approximates the pattern of the overall electorate, that restores the balance and corrects for the distorting effects of the Iowa dynamic.

Populism clearly is distressing to Bwana. How he longs for the days when well-bred aristocrats in powdered wigs and satin coats gathered in tastefully decorated drawing rooms to make decisions on behalf of the simple peasants.