Wednesday-Night

We cannot remember when we were last riveted by the coverage of a primary to the extent we have been for the Iowa caucuses. While we are delighted by the Obama win, we deplore the departure from the race of the two people we considered to have the most valuable expertise in Foreign Affairs: Senators Joe Biden and Chris Dodd. We hope and trust that the new (Democrat) President will have the good sense to appoint Joe Biden Secretary of State.
In the wake of the surprises (to many) delivered by the Iowa voters, we will endeavor to chronicle developments through Super Tuesday February 5.
For those who are somewhat confused by this process, or who seek more detail, we recommend The Washington Post’s Fast Track Campaign and/or the BBC’s somewhat more selective Primary Roadmap and poll tracker
See also McGill Professor Gil Troy’s campaign blog and his January 2007 piece on Barrack and Hillary
For lively, gossipy without malicious intent, up-to-the minute coverage, Talking Points Memo cannot be beaten.
Meanwhile , we offer the following bits of analysis, news and opinion and welcome your comments.

“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.” Peggy Noonan Wall Street Journal.

It Really Is Time For A National Primary
David A. Andelman, Forbes
With Iowans caucusing and New Hampshire voters getting set to cast their ballots five days from now in their quadrennial rites of passage, the question deserves to be raised in earnest–why do we let these two small rump states, largely white and Protestant, set the agenda for our vast, heterogeneous population in America?
While there’s still “Super Tuesday” (this year, dubbed “Super Duper Tuesday”) yet to come, the winners in these first two desperately fought contests do set the tone for the ever-broadening votes that will follow. So why do we allow this–especially when there is a clearly obvious solution?
We need a national primary in America. Certainly, it’s not a novel idea. Indeed, it was first proposed in 1911 in a bill introduced in Congress that was backed by President Woodrow Wilson–a sure kiss of death, since, four years later, it died in committee after a Senator concluded that a constitutional amendment would be necessary. More

Barack Obama’s strong victory last night is that rarity of rarities: a positive shock to the American political system. And that message is resonating beyond the Democratic party. The Republicans, however, are in a pickle. … If Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani continue to fade from the scene — and it’s hard to foresee circumstances under which they can turn their campaigns around — the race comes down to Mike Huckabee, who commands virtually no support within the party’s establishment for fear he’ll lose like Goldwater, and John McCain, in many ways a party maverick whom the establishment cordially detests even as it’s coming to recognize it may have to rally behind him. (Iowa makes McCain the prohibitive favorite to win here in New Hampshire next Tuesday.) More from The American Prospect

(NYT) Editorial
Let It Start Now
The candidates have spent a year and tens of millions of dollars in Iowa, and Thursday night the first actual voters offered their first assessments. Some candidates and their strategists were hoping the caucuses and the New Hampshire primary next week would settle the race, weeding out the contenders for the two major parties’ presidential nominations. Watching the campaign in cold, snowy and mostly empty Iowa, we were hoping for something else — that this year’s Iowa-New Hampshire rush to judgment will be the last.
For all of Thursday night’s drama, the results in Iowa did not preclude a race going into New Hampshire, and, we hope, beyond — to South Carolina, Florida and the cluster of primaries on Feb. 5. Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton, but she’s got plenty of money left, and John Edwards got a boost. Mike Huckabee’s win was unlikely to deter Mitt Romney or the Republicans who did not contest Iowa: John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani.
Keeping this race alive so significant numbers of Americans in more populated states can participate would begin to make up for the ludicrous spectacle of the past year, which enriched the television networks and the political consultants (some $300 million already spent) far more than it enriched the political dialogue. We hope both parties will wake up and end the undemocratic system in which the choice of a new president rests far too heavily on non-binding votes in January by voters that don’t necessarily represent the rest of the country.

Chris Weigant in the Huffington Post
Of the “second tier” candidates, [Senator Joe] Biden has always been the one with a coherent message, and very solid and well-thought out plans and positions. Now, Biden wasn’t expected to do particularly well in Iowa, so that’s not what disappointed me. What disappointed me was seeing him drop out before New Hampshire.
I don’t think this is the last we’ll hear from Biden, though. I would be willing to be that he’s at least on everyone’s short list for Vice Presidential candidates, and it’s also a good bet that he’ll get picked as a cabinet member in a new Democratic White House. His foreign policy experience is going to be hard to ignore when putting together any Democratic administration. Amen! We have been saying that Senator Biden would make a splendid Secretary of State.

Al Jazeera’s Dave Marash in Des Moines said that the result will give Obama momentum, credibility and much more money to campaign and compete with Clinton in New Hampshire and during the next month leading up to Super Tuesday on February 5.
The Republican result was a slight blow for Romney who had a far greater campaign budget than Huckabee but a slight boost for McCain who has largely sacrificed canvassing in Iowa to concentrate on New Hampshire. … Jack Burkman, a Republican strategist, says the results from Iowa give little indication of how the presidential race will unfold in the coming months.
“The political question in the US is what does that momentum mean going forward? I am sure it does not mean that much,” he told Al Jazeera.
“The message for international audiences is that, this time round, the US primaries have changed in that you have virtually everything at stake on February 5.
“In the past, you had a much more staggered process so that Iowa and New Hampshire meant a lot more. What’s going on in the US is the major TV networks are commercialising this for their own ends and profits.” More

EVERYBODY likes a good story, but the establishment always wins. Such is the analysis of George Bush’s victory over John McCain in the 2000 Republican contest, or, arguably, of John Kerry’s triumph over Howard Dean among the Democrats in 2004. But in the first step of America’s presidential selection process in 2008, two candidates have turned their unlikely stories into meaningful victories: Barack Obama, the Democratic winner, and Mike Huckabee, the Republican. The biggest loser in Iowa appears to be Hillary Clinton, forced into third place among the Democrats.
Mr Obama has been a favourite of the media for months, but his victory over Hillary Clinton, of the Democratic Party’s first family, seems partly to be a result of a massive increase in turn-out in Iowa (nearly double that of 2004), especially by young voters. Four in ten first-time voters (among the Democrats) apparently favoured Mr Obama. Mr Obama claimed 37.6% of the delegates up for grabs, to Mrs Clinton’s 29.5%. She even trailed, just, John Edwards, who drew 29.8%. Mr Obama also did well by scooping a large chunk of independents, and a small number of Republicans who came to the Democratic caucus to vote for him. He even beat her among women. Ms Clinton will say that she nearly tied him among real Democrats. But Mr Obama’s campaign will sensibly retort that Iowa proved the crossover appeal needed to win a general election. Change was the theme of the night, and Iowans who want it strongly preferred Mr Obama.
Mrs Clinton’s third-place finish is deeply disappointing for her, even though she retains lots of money, strong organisation and a well-recognised name and can expect to improve her performance. She has quickly turned to New Hampshire, where polls have shown her tying with (or leading) Mr Obama, and then on to South Carolina. Mr Edwards’s future looks cloudier, given the gap with Mr Obama. The Democrats appear to be heading for a two-horse race, which either can win.
For the Republicans Iowa featured a winner and loser in the state, and a winner who did not even bother to campaign there seriously, nor to show up on caucus night. Mike Huckabee’s improbable rise was confirmed with a nine-percentage-point win over Mitt Romney: Mr Huckabee got just over 34% of the vote, to Mr Romney’s 25%, with Fred Thompson and John McCain each taking just over 13%. Rudy Giuliani, who has not bothered to campaign in Iowa, scored just 3.5% support. More from The Economist

The Two Earthquakes
By DAVID BROOKS
Ottumwa, Iowa
I’ve been through election nights that brought a political earthquake to the country. I’ve never been through an election night that brought two.
Barack Obama has won the Iowa caucuses. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel moved by this. An African-American man wins a closely fought campaign in a pivotal state. He beats two strong opponents, including the mighty Clinton machine. He does it in a system that favors rural voters. He does it by getting young voters to come out to the caucuses.
This is a huge moment. It’s one of those times when a movement that seemed ethereal and idealistic became a reality and took on political substance.
Iowa won’t settle the race, but the rest of the primary season is going to be colored by the glow of this result. Whatever their political affiliations, Americans are going to feel good about the Obama victory, which is a story of youth, possibility and unity through diversity — the primordial themes of the American experience.
And Americans are not going to want to see this stopped. When an African-American man is leading a juggernaut to the White House, do you want to be the one to stand up and say No?
Obama has achieved something remarkable. At first blush, his speeches are abstract, secular sermons of personal uplift — filled with disquisitions on the nature of hope and the contours of change.
He talks about erasing old categories like red and blue (and implicitly, black and white) and replacing them with new categories, of which the most important are new and old. He seems at first more preoccupied with changing thinking than changing legislation.
Yet over the course of his speeches and over the course of this campaign, he has persuaded many Iowans that there is substance here as well. He built a great organization and produced a tangible victory.
He’s made Hillary Clinton, with her wonkish, pragmatic approach to politics, seem uninspired. He’s made John Edwards, with his angry cries that “corporate greed is killing your children’s future,” seem old-fashioned. Edwards’s political career is probably over.
Obama is changing the tone of American liberalism, and maybe American politics, too.
On the Republican side, my message is: Be not afraid. Some people are going to tell you that Mike Huckabee’s victory last night in Iowa represents a triumph for the creationist crusaders. Wrong.
Huckabee won because he tapped into realities that other Republicans have been slow to recognize. First, evangelicals have changed. Huckabee is the first ironic evangelical on the national stage. He’s funny, campy (see his Chuck Norris fixation) and he’s not at war with modern culture.
Second, Huckabee understands much better than Mitt Romney that we have a crisis of authority in this country. People have lost faith in their leaders’ ability to respond to problems. While Romney embodies the leadership class, Huckabee went after it. He criticized Wall Street and K Street. Most importantly, he sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had at him, and their diminished power is now exposed.
Third, Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived. Democrats talk about wages. But real middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. A person’s lifetime prospects will be threatened more by single parenting than by outsourcing. Huckabee understands that economic well-being is fused with social and moral well-being, and he talks about the inter-relationship in a way no other candidate has.
In that sense, Huckabee’s victory is not a step into the past. It opens up the way for a new coalition.
A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.
Will Huckabee move on and lead this new conservatism? Highly doubtful. The past few weeks have exposed his serious flaws as a presidential candidate. His foreign policy knowledge is minimal. His lapses into amateurishness simply won’t fly in a national campaign.
So the race will move on to New Hampshire. Mitt Romney is now grievously wounded. Romney represents what’s left of Republicanism 1.0. Huckabee and McCain represent half-formed iterations of Republicanism 2.0. My guess is Republicans will now swing behind McCain in order to stop Mike.
Huckabee probably won’t be the nominee, but starting last night in Iowa, an evangelical began the Republican Reformation.