DES MOINES — It will be said – all-purpose scofflaw
Christopher Hitchens had already said it on the eve of the caucuses – that the
results in Iowa could not be trusted because they were not the usual kind of
one-man, one-vote suffrage and because the various candidates’ camps had offered
inducements to supporters. Free rides to the caucus sites, modest souvenir
goodies, things like that.
Hitchens should have spent Thursday night in Cedar Falls,
the northeast Iowa sister city to Waterloo, where Leigh Bailey Kroeger
(disclaimer: my niece) presided over Democrats caucusing at Ward 3, Precinct 2.
“It was like a freight train,” she said of the teeming turnout for Barack Obama.
They were the lion’s share of the record 258 caucusers that showed up, and it
was obvious nobody baited the Illinois senator’s adherents to come, and that
nothing could have kept them from coming (though even the weather, clear
and only modestly cold by mid-winter Iowa standards, put up little resistance).
Democratic caucuses in Iowa are famous for the
horse-trading that goes on mid-way when lower-rung candidates fail to get the
necessary 15 percent share of the turnout to remain “viable” and their
supporters are free to join one of the other candidates’ camps.
Normally, there’s a lot of pleading and cajoling. Not so Thursday night. The
Obama people made it clear they didn’t need to get down on bended knee, and the
designated representatives of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, for their part,
just couldn’t make the sale.
“It was more like an American Gladiator contest than the
usual caucus give-and -take,” said Kroeger.
Hence, there was much less changing sides than usual,
although Kroeger herself, a Biden supporter, organized a modest switch-over to
Hillary Clinton. “She was trailing way behind Edwards, and I like all three of
the top three, so I thought it would be appropriate to keep them as close
together as possible.”
In the end, all that did was give Clinton two delegates to
go with Edwards’ two. Obama had a comfortably disproportionate five.
Talk about a “coalition of the willing!” Obama’s,
incidentally, while youth-oriented to some degree, was made up almost entirely
of white-bread middle-class Iowans – a rebuke in advance to any notion that his
candidacy depends on – or is even appreciably predicated on – a black, urban
constituency.
Most of the pundits and the established media seem to grasp
that – though they haven’t escaped their census-takers’ mentality nearly so well
in the case of Republican winner Mike Huckabee. Only Pat Buchanan, of the
talking heads on TV Thursday night, seemed to understand the obvious – that much
of Huckabee’s vote came measurably from his message of economic populism, aimed
at the country’s worker bees and those familiar, as he once said, with “the grub
of the earth on their hands.”
New Hampshire has its share of those as well, its different urban-Eastern
demographics and its straight-out primary system notwithstanding, and Huckabee
has at least a fair chance of holding up his end there, too, against rivals Mitt
Romney, John McCain, and Fred Thompson. Rudy Giuliani is still AWOL, and anti-war
libertarian Ron Paul is a wild card. As for Obama the freight train – the trick
for Clinton and Edwards is just to stay close enough to keep the game in play –
lest the game simplify itself too quickly to American Gladiator. Singular.