The Iowa factor

Poor little Mittens has lost his kittens

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
1/6/08

Every analyst and spinmeister in the country is examining the Iowa caucuses and making pronouncements on What It All Means.

The reality, of course, is that it doesn’t mean much. It’s a bit like Spring Training in that it gives you an idea of the relative strengths and weaknesses of all the major league baseball teams, but doesn’t tell you a thing about who the World Series champion will be seven months later.

That Barack Obama won is a credit to Iowans, and proof that America is ready for a black president. No matter what happens between now and November, that is a step forward.

The Democratic race is still up in the air, and about the only thing that got settled was that Dodd and Biden won’t be freezing their asses off in New Hampshire today. They’re out. It’s a bit like when the Seattle Pilots folded after one season; it was a bit of a shame, but it didn’t really have any impact on baseball. (Look, it’s snowing like hell here. Do you BLAME me if I’m longing for spring training?)

Everyone’s talking about what a setback Iowa was for Hillary Clinton, but I’m guessing she’ll do well in New Hampshire on Tuesday, and that will be the end of that talk except among the Hillary haters, who will whine that “she didn’t deserve the Presidency because she came in third in Iowa” for the next 75 years. Fact is, most new presidents managed to lose in Iowa in their campaigns. It’s no big deal. Hillary got her nose tweaked, but she’s not dead.

On the Republican side, of course, it was much more clear cut. Romney outspent Huckabee by an amazing 15-1 margin, using his own money for the most part. Three weeks ago, he was considered a wrap for Iowa, and it was presumed that would give him that magic carpet of political pundits, momentum, going into the actual primaries.

It’s one thing to say that Huckabee had the support of the Christian right. I saw one estimate that 80% of Huckabee voters were self-identified evangelicals; although there doesn’t seem to be any formal polling available on that, I shouldn’t wonder. But Giuliani had the blessing of Pat Robertson, and he only got 3,500 or so votes. It’s worth noting that the same Pat Robertson won Iowa in 1988, defeating George Bush the elder. Romney himself is a Mormon, which is a sort-of Christian. Alan Keyes and Duncan Hunter, who both won several farm households each, are both bible-bangers.

So what made Huckabee stand out, and overcome that 15-to-1 margin in advertising and travel and everything and blow Romney out of the water?

He has one thing that makes him unique among GOP candidates. He’s an economic populist. That’s why the well-fed media clowns like O’Reilly and Limbaugh hate him so much. He’s a traitor to their class, or at least would be if he had ever BEEN a member of their class. All the other GOP frontrunners are wealthy, elitist, and dedicated to keeping the wealthy elitists rich and powerful.

Iowa is a swing state, and reflected the closeness of the last two elections. The east tends to be Democratic, the west Republican with a fairly linear graduation from one side to the other. They tend not to be doctrinaire.

They’ve also noticed what much of the country has noticed: Iraq wasn’t a glorious moment for America, the economy has tanked, rights and freedoms are under assault, and the Republican candidates are lying about all of that. The only two who broke ranks with the dark-suit-and-flag lapel crowd are Huckabee and Ron Paul, and both have done better than expected.

Huckabee is the only one who isn’t preaching the free market gospel. In fact, he’s a prairie populist, concerned more with the needs of the poor, the elderly, and the working class than he is with the monied elite. When it comes to economic policy, he sounds more like the late Senator Paul Wellstone than he does Mitt Romney or Rudolph Guiliani. He doesn’t think if the middle class give the rich all their money, the rich will be grateful and take good care of them, and he doesn’t even think that’s how it should work in America.

Of course, to the plutocrats who run the GOP, this is sheer anathema. Why, the man might as well be a communist, or worse, a Democrat! At least, that’s how they see it. So the right wing spin machine has begun bashing Huckabee hard, hoping to put a dent in his standing before New Hampshire.

But they have to be careful. Huckabee caught a ground swell of populism that has been quietly growing in the GOP base over the past few years, but he’s seen as primarily a candidate for the religious right, and the GOP doesn’t want to alienate the remaining support they have there. The religious right feel like the GOP has treated them like a cheap date and in fact the GOP has. Six years of near absolute control of the government, and the GOP blew off the religious right, giving them a slice of government pie but otherwise ignoring them. And the religious right is disillusioned, by the economy, by Iraq, and by the endless parade of scandals and lies from this administration. As one member of the religious right and former GOP member said, “When you mix politics and religion, what you get is politics.”

Everyone is missing a very important thing about Iowa. Everyone talks about how Iowa doesn’t represent America, and that’s true. There aren’t a lot of minorities, there aren’t any really big cities, the state is mostly rural, and folks there don’t want to be like the folks in New York or Los Angeles.

But Iowa is a pretty good example of the GOP base outside of Washington and New York. Mostly white, socially conservative and non-urban. But unlike the Republicans on the beltway and on Wall Street, they aren’t ideologues, they aren’t doctrinaire. They don’t believe in trickle down economics and in fact are heartily fed up with being cheated by them. They don’t approve of Iraq, and they despise torture and concentration camps.

Bad enough for the GOP that in a state settled by less than 1% the last two elections, Democrats turned out to caucus by a 2 to 1 margin over Republicans. But a third of Republicans happily repudiated the core principle of the GOP: “feed the rich.”

We saw a similar result on the Democratic side, albeit toned down: Edwards beat Hillary, with a twin standard of get-out-of-Iraq and stop-the-corporations. The most charitable thing you can say about Hillary’s stand on these two issues is that it’s indistinct.

The GOP pundits and much of the corporate media can’t admit it, but economic populism, for the first time in 30 years, has become an issue. Put in a nutshell, people are fed up with being screwed by the rich.

Primary results will perplex and confound “the experts” as a result. The GOP are in the position of a man who is trying to sail a yacht while denying that there is a hurricane over his head.