Iowa

Not exactly a big surprise: Huckabee wins the Republican caucus.  From Washington Post:

Mike Huckabee  34%
Mitt Romney       25%,
Fred Thompson   13%
John McCain     13% 
Ron Paul             10%.

Obama wins big on the Democratic side.

Barack Obama  38%
John Edwards    30% 
Hillary Clinton   29%

First, the Winners. 

Huckabee and Obama both have something to cheer about.  Huckabee beat long odds to finally achieve front runner status where it really counts: in delegate totals.  I confess that I expected otherwise.  I thought his very bad no good week would turn him into this year's Howard Dean.  Shows you what I know.  Obama has seemed like a sure thing in Iowa for a long time, but his eight percent looks pretty convincing. Both parties voted for "change," which  is more often a sign of disaffection than of preference. 

Beyond that, Huckabee still has a lot further to go than Obama.  He seems to have been carried to victory in Iowa almost entirely by the evangelical vote.  That can happen only in a caucus state.  To keep winning he has to enjoy a surge of support in the coming primary states, beginning with New Hampshire where he is still in fourth place in the polls.  Maybe the big Mo will produce such a surge, but I will be a little surprised. 

Obama, by contrast, looks to have a lot of assets that he can exploit in the coming contests.  Black voters tend to support more establishment candidates, and abandon them for someone like Jesse Jackson only when the latter is "authentic."  Obama's background is hardly the traditional Black experience.  On the other hand, will Black voters really pass up a chance to elect the first Black president?  If Black voters do swing his way, Senator Clinton is in deep trouble. Moreover, Obama is in a much better position in New Hampshire than Huckabee.  If he pulls ahead there, Hillary becomes the underdog.

On the other hand, and here I hedge my bets, Ms. Clinton did much better among older voters than Senator Obama did.  Older voters will be increasingly represented in primaries, and even more so in the general election.  She has all the baggage of a Clinton, with none of the charm.  Short of a personality transplant, she will always repel a lot of the support she needs.  But she has paid her dues, and is by all reasonable accounts the more qualified candidate.   I wouldn't count Ms. Clinton out.

The Runners Up.

Romney looks to have taken a tumble, but in fact he remains where he had been for most of the last year.  He has significant but insufficient support, and can't seem to improve on it.  They say you ain't out till you are out of money, and he has deep pockets.  But if he loses to McCain in New Hampshire, I am guessing he is out of it.  Right now McCain is the Republican to watch.  His tie for third was probably good enough for the venue, and a victory in New Hampshire puts him back on the board.  Giuliani has been out of the news loop for weeks, and neither Iowa nor New Hampshire is likely to put him back in.  Fred Thompson, the Hamlet of Hollywood, is out of money and I don't think that is going to change.

Edwards is finished.  It looks like he couldn't even carry the union vote in Iowa, and if not that and there, then what and where?  He will hang in there for a while, but the Democratic race looks to be a two person contest from here on out.

Signs of Social Progress

When I heard Juan Williams on Fox comment that the Democratic race has come down to a Black candidate and a woman, my first reaction was: "Oh."  I wasn't thinking about that, and most of the media mind wasn't thinking about it either.  Nor were the voters.  Iowa is only slightly less White than your average polar bear, so it's hard to tell about the race thing.  But it looks like most of the women who showed up for the Democratic caucus voted for Obama.  The truth is that we are all thinking of Obama and Clinton as candidates, not as representatives of their demographic identities.  That is a new thing, I think.  We may be finally moving out of the race and sex consciousness that has haunted American politics for many decades.  I would call that progress.