The Big Winners

[thedrifter]

January 04, 2008
The Big Winners
By Richard Baehr

There were three winners in Iowa last night: Mike Huckabee, Barack Obama, and John McCain. The race in both parties has now changed, with the path to the nomination clearer on the Democratic side than the Republican.

The Democrats

Barack Obama won decisively, by 8% over Edwards and 9% over Clinton. Voters under age 30 made up a fifth of the Democratic caucus voters and they gave over 50% of their votes to Obama. This has to make GOP strategists nervous about the general election if Obama is the nominee. Young voters are often not picked up in polling surveys, since many only use cell phones. Traditional election models may be useless if Obama is the Democratic Party nominee.

Will Obama now be the nominee? He has quite a few things going for him: momentum, media love, steely ambition, and lots of money. Obama was already about even with Clinton in New Hampshire before the Iowa caucus results were known. He will now surely vault ahead of her there.

He is also now the favorite in South Carolina , where almost half of Democratic Party primary voters will be African American. Black voters had taken a bit of a wait-and-see attitude with Obama, not sure he could win. Now they are likely to abandon Clinton and shift to Obama in large numbers. That means the potential for big wins in states like Maryland, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, where the African American share of the population is 20% or more, and about double that in Democratic primaries.

Hillary Clinton's path to the nomination is now very much at risk. But she is still in the game. She is likely to do well in some of the large states voting on February 5th (New York and New Jersey, among them). But most of her national polling lead of roughly 20% will disappear within days. And that means that she will lose the leads she now holds in many of the states that will vote on February 5th.

Can Clinton recover? She has lots of money, and an infrastructure in place in many states. But her strength was the sense of inevitability about her winning, and her claim of long and meaningful experience. Neither was enough to win in Iowa. In Iowa, Clinton benefited from a strong race by John Edwards, which served to dilute the anyone but Clinton vote. Edwards does not have the money that Obama and Clinton have, and will likely be gone after South Carolina. His obsession with the Presidency will have to wait until 2012, assuming the GOP wins next year, or 2016 if they do not. Edwards'parroting of Ralph Nader's anti-corporation message would never win a general election, but he also had no choice except to run to the left of the other major candidates. With Edwards out of the race at some point, most of his support will go to Obama, which only makes Clinton's predicament even larger.

At this point, I think the likelihood of Obama winning the nomination is over 50%. Hillary has most of the Democratic Party's super delegates committed to her, and she will work to try to weaken Obama by putting the spotlight on him in as unfavorable a light as possible. And she will fight for every delegate in every state. But if Obama wins most of the state contests, she is doomed.

Running against Obama is very tricky. It is hard to run against hope and unity, and breaking the color line and all that symbolizes. Yes, Obama is inexperienced. His instincts on dealing with the threat of Islamic jihadists suggests naïvete. They do not want to sit down and talk with us, not even him.

But it may not matter. Obama is connecting with Democrats, independents, and some Republicans. After the bitterness of the Clinton and Bush years, he is an analgesic, a fresh face, promising better times and a more peaceful politics. The Republicans may rue the day Obama won Iowa, since Clinton would be a far easier candidate to run against.

The Republicans

Could Mike Huckabee actually win the nomination? I think he could, though his road to victory is much more difficult than Obama's. Huckabee will likely get a boost in New Hampshire from his big Iowa win (9% over Romney), but it is hard to see him following up the Iowa victory with one in New Hampshire. More likely, he finishes third in the Granite State, unless Romney's support collapses there and Huckabee places second.

John McCain, who will finish in an approximate tie for third in Iowa with Fred Thompson, is in very good shape to win New Hampshire against Romney's damaged campaign. McCain was already ahead in New Hampshire, and his showing in Iowa was quite respectable given how little time he spent there. Within days, the national polls will show Huckabee and McCain running one two in that order or the reverse order.

Huckabee has raised little money, but he did not need a lot of money to win in Iowa. Chuck Norris served him at least as well as Oprah served Obama. Mitt Romney came off too corporate, Huckabee more genuine, funnier and warmer. His achievement should not be under-estimated.

Obama was seen as a serious contender from the start, even if not the favorite. Huckabee was an unknown a year ago, and is the only candidate to emerge from the second tier in either party, and to emerge needless to say, in a big way.

How far can Huckabee go? He is now the clear favorite in South Carolina on January 19, and is probably the favorite in many southern state primaries, and states with large evangelical populations. If Romney, and Thompson, and McCain and Rudy Giuliani all stick around for a while, he will win quite a few states. In a two man contest, against say McCain, I think he loses, maybe to wind up in the second spot on the ticket.

Huckabee, McCain and Giuliani have all shared a goal of keeping Mitt Romney from sweeping the early state races, and they have succeeded. The main testiness in the GOP race has been Romney with Huckabee and Romney with McCain. Romney will not just give up, and he will fight hard to win one or more of the contests in New Hampshire, Nevada, Michigan, and South Carolina. But his strategy of running the table in these states and becoming inevitable is shattered. He has the money and will to go on, and is not out of the race.

Rudy Giuliani finished 6th in Iowa, and may suffer another bad defeat in New Hampshire, where Huckabee and Ron Paul may both pass him, pushing him to 5th. A series of bad defeats in all the early races, makes his planned comeback in Florida on January 29th less likely. He is not finished, but since he and McCain draw from the same well, McCain's upward movement has coincided with Rudy dropping off. Fred Thompson needed to do well in Iowa, and while he did better than I expected him to do, it is not enough to get him the money or buzz needed to get back in the race.

So that leaves Romney, Huckabee and McCain, with the momentum with Huckabee and McCain. Both Huckabee and McCain are problematic for large sectors of the GOP. The biggest difference between the two is the potential for a win next November. Try as I might, I do not see how Huckabee cobbles together 270 Electoral College votes against either Obama or Clinton. In fact, he might lose very badly.

McCain would be a favorite against Clinton and 50-50 at best against Obama, unless the Obama glow wears off by then. An Obama-McCain race would feature huge contrasts: age difference, experience, maturity, positions on the Iraq war. McCain is close to the center, and can appeal to independents, like Obama. Their race, if it comes to this, would likely turn on whether foreign threats trumped the domestic agenda. At this point, more people want to talk about healthcare, the economy, the housing slump, than Iraq or Afghanistan or Al Qaeda. That works to Obama's favor.

In the last 3 elections the winner in November also won Iowa. Last night might make it four in a row.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

PEGGY NOONAN

Out With the Old, In With the New
Obama and Huckabee rise; Mrs. Clinton falls.

Friday, January 4, 2008 12:01 a.m. EST

And so it begins.

We wanted exciting, we got exciting.

As this is written, late on the night of the caucuses, the outlines of the decisions seem clear: Barack Obama won.

Hillary Clinton, the inevitable, the avatar of the machine, lost.

It's huge. Even though people have been talking about this possibility for six weeks now, it's still huge. She had the money, she had the organization, the party's stars, she had Elvis behind her, and the Clinton name in a base that loved Bill. And she lost. There are always a lot of reasons for a loss, but the Ur reason in this case, the thing it all comes down to? There's something about her that makes you look, watch, think, look again, weigh and say: No.

She started out way ahead, met everyone, and lost.

As for Sen. Obama, his victory is similarly huge. He won the five biggest counties in Iowa, from the center of the state to the South Dakota border. He carried the young in a tidal wave. He outpolled Mrs. Clinton among women.

He did it with a classy campaign, an unruffled manner, and an appeal on the stump that said every day, through the lines: Look at who I am and see me, the change that you desire is right here, move on with me and we will bring it forward together.

He had a harder row to hoe than Mrs. Clinton did. He was lesser known, too young, lacked an establishment. He had to knock her down while building himself up. (She only had to build herself up until the end, when she went after his grade-school essays.) His takedown of Mrs. Clinton was the softest demolition in the history of falling buildings. I think we were there when it happened, in the debate in which he was questioned on why so many of Bill Clinton's aides were advising him. She laughed, and he said he was looking forward to her advising him, too. He took mama to school.

And so something new begins on the Democratic side.




Something new begins on the Republican side, too.

Everyone said Mike Huckabee was a big dope to leave Iowa Wednesday to fly to L.A. to be on Jay Leno, but did you see him on that thing? He got off a perfect line on why he's doing well against Romney: "People are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of the guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off." The studio audience loved him. And you know, in Iowa they watch "The Tonight Show" too.

Mr. Huckabee likes to head-fake people into thinking he's Gomer Pyle, but he's more like the barefoot boy of the green room. He's more James Carville than Jim Nabors.

What we have learned about Mr. Huckabee the past few months is that he's an ace entertainer with a warm, witty and compelling persona. He won with no money and little formal organization, with an evangelical network, with a folksy manner, and with the best guileless pose in modern politics. From the mail I have received the past month after criticizing him in this space, I would say his great power, the thing really pushing his supporters, is that they believe that what ails America and threatens its continued existence is not economic collapse or jihad, it is our culture.

They have been bruised and offended by the rigid, almost militant secularism and multiculturalism of the public schools; they reject those schools' squalor, in all senses of the word. They believe in God and family and America. They are populist: They don't admire billionaire CEOs, they admire husbands with two jobs who hold the family together for the sake of the kids; they don't need to see the triumph of supply-side thinking, they want to see that suffering woman down the street get the help she needs.

They believe that Mr. Huckabee, the minister who speaks their language, shares, down to the bone, their anxieties, concerns and beliefs. They fear that the other Republican candidates are caught up in a million smaller issues--taxing, spending, the global economy, Sunnis and Shia--and missing the central issue: again, our culture. They are populists who vote Republican, and as I have read their letters, I have felt nothing but respect.

But there are two problems. One is that while the presidency, as an office, can actually make real changes in the areas of economic and foreign policy, the federal government has a limited ability to change the culture of America. That is something conservatives used to know. Second, I'm sorry to say it is my sense that Mr. Huckabee is not so much leading a movement as riding a wave. One senses he brilliantly discerned and pursued an underserved part of the voting demographic, and went for it. Clever fellow. To me, the tipoff was "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"




My sense is that Mr. Huckabee's good supporters deserve a better leader.

His next problem may be not so much New Hampshire as Ed Rollins, the Reagan White House political aide who came in a week ago to manage his campaign. Mr. Rollins began his tenure announcing to respectful young reporters that he--"the grizzled veteran," the "old battler"--would like to sink to his knees and "shoot Romney in the groin" and "punch his teeth out." Such class is of course always welcome on the trail, but one senses the verbal ante will constantly be upped, and I'm not sure that will work well for Mr. Huckabee. Self inflated dirigibles, especially unmoored ones, can cast shadows on parades.

Ellie