Winners and losers in Iowa

The Iowa caucuses are over, and with Barack Obama’s and Mike Huckabee’s rather stunning and convincing wins over the rest of the Democratic and Republican fields, respectively, I though I would add my admittedly paltry two cents to the fray—what’s the blogosphere for, anyway?

The winners: Obama and Huckabee rightly deserve the praise for winning by such impressive margins, and at least in Obama’s case a clear front-runner has emerged and everybody else is playing catch-up. John Edwards, however, made a strong showing, and finished second—barely ahead of Hillary, but the only thing that registers with many people is the ordinal numbers in front of the names. He will definitely also be a factor in the upcoming weeks. The other clear winner is John “100 years in Iraq is fine by me” McCain, who seems to be getting a hell of a lot of media attention from various sources that for whatever reason simply love to fawn on him. He didn’t do very well in the caucuses, but he’s going to have lots of media momentum on his side.

The sort-of winners: Mike Huckabee may have won the caucuses by a 9% margin, but the Republican side is still extremely muddled. Giuliani finished sixth in the caucuses, except he had never really paid much attention to Iowa at all, and still definitely has the wherewithal to do well in many other states, especially those that hold their primary elections on Super Tuesday. The other person who had some kind of victory was Ron Paul, who managed to pull out a whopping 10%. This from a guy everyone wishes would just go away. Giuliani came in sixth with 3.5%, and he’s still getting invited to Fox News’s debate, whereas fifth-place Ron Paul is still being unceremoniously excluded. Ron Paul won’t win the Republican nomination, but be on the lookout for a possible third-party bid that could Naderize the Republican side of the 2008 elections. He certainly has the fundraising apparatus and crazy robot-like supporters—almost à la another erstwhile also-ran and his cult-like following—to make a fight of it.

The losers: Mitt Romney doesn’t come out of this looking good, but Hillary Clinton, obviously, is the big loser of the night. Her whole campaign was based on the inevitability of her candidacy, and now that approach is obviously broken and in need of some serious (and fast) rethinking. So she’s now reduced to insinuating that Obama is ‘too liberal‘ and that he has has associations with left-wing intellectuals. Err, the 1920s called; they want their rhetoric back. (Actually, it wasn’t historically just rhetoric: sometimes it was blatant xenophobia too.)

The whole primary/caucus process in the United States is silly, with various states wielding disproportionate influence. Complaining about this is old hat, however, and there’s really nothing new to be said about it. Nothing is going to change until the abolition of federalism and the recognition of all citizens of the great ‘democracy’ of the United States as truly equal—not just those who happen to live within arbitrary boundaries that for stupid historical reasons dictate that they can proceed to dictate to the rest of the country who’s going to be on their ballots in November.

So yeah, look for that.