Tethered Swimming

John McCain wins Florida; Barack Obama wins South Carolina. Can two crooked southern states really propel us toward an ideal, and I mean ideal, matchup in November? Can we really be that lucky? We’re going to find out.

On the Republican side I still can’t quite bring myself to believe that the GOP is foolish enough to nominate Bob Dole a second time. They do remember that nominating geriatric senators, while useful from a comedy and stereotype perspective, isn’t a good idea electorally, don’t they? Don’t get me wrong, I liked McCain once upon a time. Eight years ago he might have been a good president, certainly he’d have been better than Bush the Younger. My armchair psychology theory is that coming that close to the office eight years ago, and lusting after it since, has driven him a little nuts. Losing to Bush the Younger in such a sleazy way convinced him that his brand of Arizona politics wasn’t going to work on a national stage. He wasn’t an angel in 2000 or earlier, but there was a lot more to admire before he started whoring himself to become president.

Take a look at the following two Daily Show clips from two years ago. They are both from the 4 April 2006 episode. First there’s McCain in 2000 in the much publicized “agents of intolerance” speech, then there’s McCain in 2006 standing resolutely by Bush the Younger as Iraq continued to sap his popularity (Link). The second clip is the senator’s pathetic defense of his impending visit to Jerry Falwell. The half hearted explanations and logical contortions are painful to watch for anyone who, like me, voted for the Senator eight years ago (Link). McCain might once have been a fierce opponent, with a lot of moderate appeal, in a national election. Now he’s just another tired, old senator desperately seeking to end his career on top.

Mitt Romney cannot be discounted though, especially in a de facto two man race. I continue to think he’s the more likely Red nominee and while I have no polling data to back that up, I do have two incontrovertible observations. One, he has the backing of most of the party establishment. Two, he has vastly more money. On the second point I am eagerly awaiting the inevitable story, once the nominee is known, of just how much money Romney has spent. My hunch is that it is going to be a jaw dropping figure whether he wins or not.

There are a lot of polls that disagree with me on this, but in the general election I still fear Romney a lot more than I fear McCain. Over at RealClearPolitics they’ve got a page that lists all of the national head-to-head polling data. Right down the line Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and even John Edwards trounce every Republican except McCain. Polls this far from an election are meaningless and if you don’t believe that, Rudy Giuliani would like a word with you.

One of the reasons I’m a lot more worried about Romney is that while both he and McCain are transparent panderers, Romney is a lot better at it than McCain. Take a look at that second Daily Show clip again. McCain is less than graceful when confronted with his own bullshit. Romney, on the other hand, doesn’t mind in the least. He’s much more comfortable with the enormous amount of dishonesty required to win national office. Add that to the fact that Romney is younger, better looking (that does matter), richer, and far less associated with Iraq than McCain and you’ve got a man who can win in November. It also helps that Romney is a governor from a blue state instead of a senator from a red one. Governors have a much better track record than senators when it comes to becoming president. Remember, the last man to make the leap from the Senate straight to the White House was John F. Kennedy.

On the Democratic side I’m happy to see that despite a concerted effort from Team Clinton, Hillary Clinton isn’t getting much attention for defeating no one in Florida. (The Democratic primary made it onto the front page of today’s New York Times by the slimmest of margins; it was the very last sentence before the jump.) This is just the most recent example of her willingness to fight dirtier than Obama. Trying to blunt his press momentum from South Carolina by making noises about seating delegates from Michigan and Florida is a dishonest “move the goalposts” play right out of the book of Rove. She wasn’t feeling quite so wronged about the disenfranchisement of voters in Michigan and Florida while she was still courting the ones in Iowa and New Hampshire. Tactics like those have kept her alive in the race so far, but they clearly cost her last Saturday. The question now is will they cost her again next Tuesday.

I think Obama is in better shape to become the nominee, though the fact that I vastly prefer him to Clinton(s) may be clouding my thinking. I’ve underestimated Hillary Clinton’s campaign before, I’d hate to do it again and this race is far from over.

That being said, the prospect of a Barack Obama versus John McCain is a matchup I would love to see. On one side you’d have the young, idealistic Illinois senator running against the war and against the current Administration, on the other side would be the elderly, ex-maverick Arizona senator running to continue the war hand in hand with the current Administration. There is no ceiling to the size of Obama’s victory in that contest.

At the moment the wind is blowing in that direction, but my nightmare of Hillary Clinton versus Mitt Romney may still come to pass. That would pit a senator who stood up and clapped at the State of the Union when Bush the Younger said the, ahem, surge was working and who, along with her husband (plus all of his baggage), is the only thing all Republicans can agree upon against the charming ex-governor of Massachusetts who can change shape on command and will look a lot less objectionable to middle of the road voters standing next to Hillary Clinton. Does she win? Maybe, but either way it’s razor thin. Win and we get four more years of the Clinton circus. Lose and the Democratic party, to say nothing of the Republic and the planet as a whole, take a giant step backward.

Let it be Obama. Let it be McCain.

The very real possibility of Hillary Clinton becoming the Democratic nominee, a prospect that I considered little more than a media fantasy until the New Hampshire and Nevada results came back, has frightened me into liking Barack Obama a lot more than I used to. His win yesterday in South Carolina did a lot to ease my mind. His campaign looked very good in victory and while no one knows what is going to happen next Tuesday the newly explicit focus on racial politics is immensely to his advantage, not only in South Carolina but nationwide as well.

Last year Bill O’Reilly went to a restaurant in Harlem and got into a little hot water for basically saying out loud what a lot of his audience probably thinks, “Golly gee, when these negroes are well behaved they’re just like us!” A great many white people in this country view racism, of the black people vs white people variety, as something which has been adequately addressed. You can see this attitude in everything from lawsuits about the racial makeup of classrooms (from kindergarten to graduate school) to the drunken ramblings of those South Carolina frat boys in the Borat movie to Stephen Colbert’s trenchant running gag about not being able to see race.

Most of the time I see the phrase “white guilt” deployed it’s under the assumption that such guilt is unjustified. Not just on an individual level either, but that white people as a group no longer have anything to feel guilty about. “Silly white liberals”, the conservative line of thought goes, “Still feeling bad for things that happened decades or centuries ago.” The underlying assumption behind that line of thinking is that racism is a minor problem that causes little more than inconvenience. After all, the two biggest legislative achievements of the civil rights movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, have now been on the books for more than four decades. To white people living in white neighborhoods with kids in white schools black people are out of sight and out of mind.

For the most part that ignorance isn’t willful; it’s just the natural result of the human reluctance to face unpleasant truths. Obama and his candidacy force topics of conversation that most white people, liberal and conservative, would rather avoid. Once you can no longer ignore racism you have to face the fact that it is still very real and still has very damaging effects on the lives of millions of American citizens. When undeniable problems (the overt racism of the war on drugs, the scandalous neglect of minority education, disenfranchisement, etc) break through the clutter of modern life and really make themselves widely known it can make a lot of people feel the need to do something.

Even if that something is as trivial as bothering to go and vote it can help Obama break through the apathy behind our low turnout rates. People that don’t vote have been a glittering prize in the eyes of politicians and their henchmen for decades. But they’ve remained theoretical with such stubbornness that they’ve become the Keyser Soze of politics. Nobody considered serious really believes in them, but they still scare the shit out of professional politicos because you just never know. Precisely because of his skin color Obama can elicit more excitement than any other candidate and if he can make even a little bit of the prophecy of the non-voter come true not only will he win the nomination, but he’ll will in a landslide in November.

White guilt is not some form of non-monetary reparations for past injustices like slavery. It’s guilt about ongoing racial disadvantages. Racism is generally seen through the lens of how bad it is for minorities, here’s how many black men are in prison, here’s how much more black people pay for loans, here’s how much lower test scores are, ad nauseam. But what doesn’t get mentioned as often is that white people are therefore advantaged. The advantages (lighter punishments for lawbreaking, easier career advancement, etc) are overwhelmingly outweighed by the damage that racism does to society as a whole, but they exist nonetheless. Because those advantages go to all white people, regardless of their politics or situation, it means that all white people are beneficiaries of racism and that is something to which guilt is an appropriate reaction.

Hillary would be capable of the same kind of appeal if her last name was Rodham or Smith or anything other than Clinton. If her husband was merely some lawyer or even had just topped out as governor of Arkansas, she would be able to make the same claims about being transformative that Obama does. It would be exciting, something genuinely new under the sun, to have a female president. But in the eyes of many Hillary is a Clinton first and a woman second. Her campaign has presented her as the Third Clinton Term that so many would’ve preferred to the Bush Restoration. But in doing so it sacrifices the advantages of running as a woman while still bearing the disadvantages.

It’s not like sexism isn’t still with us, but there is no “male guilt”. Maybe that’s because sexism is more acceptable than racism, but maybe it’s because no national political figure has ever tried to exploit it. Most men don’t think about the disadvantages and lost opportunities for women any more than most white people think about the disadvantages and lost opportunities for minorities.

Setting aside the issue of who has it tougher in life and politics, black people or women, the simple fact is that Obama has turned his novel status as a minority candidate to his advantage. Hillary hasn’t even tried. The closest she came was the tearless but emotional incident in New Hampshire and it resulted in her first victory. Despite its recent race based attacks the Clinton campaign has been extraordinarily timid in its strategy. Hillary and her surrogates aren’t talking about the wage gap between men and women, or domestic violence, or even something as non-controversial as Third World female genital mutilation. They’re on record as thinking that she has to appear tough and masculine to some extent because a more feminine campaign would cost them votes. They may be right about that, but the fact that they’re openly asking the question displays a shocking lack of faith in the electorate as well as a shortage of confidence in their campaign.

The accepted political wisdom is that a Hillary Clinton campaign with more emphasis on gender issues is a loser. The press and her campaign brain trust think that that is not what the public wants to see from her. But I’m not so sure. On issues of tolerance and diversity, from interracial romance to accepting homosexuals, the public is usually ahead of the press, and way ahead of the government. The success of the Obama campaign in the more racialized political environment of the last couple of weeks has shown that the public is willing to see not being a white male as an advantage. By running as Mrs. Bill Clinton, Hillary has sacrificed whatever benefits gender politics have to offer her while still bearing the costs.

Obama can lay the most credible claim to being a genuinely revolutionary candidate. He can convince people that he can change the way politics is practiced in this country because he is, forgive the term, his own man. Hillary Clinton isn’t her own woman, she’s a serious candidate only because of who her husband is. She’s not even the preferred half of the team. Clinton voters in New Hampshire would’ve voted for her husband instead of her by a fourteen point margin.

The conventional assumption is that Clinton is running a tougher campaign than Obama. Clinton talks about making hard compromises while Obama hides behind his foolish hope that nice language will make the Republicans behave like grownups. But the opposite is true, it is Obama who is running the bold campaign. In the tradition of many successful politicians he is promising a lot, but people like to be promised things. The politics of hope did well yesterday, among white people and black people. Here’s hoping he keeps it up and hey, in 2016 maybe there will be a candidate willing to run as a woman instead of as a wife.

“Oh, don’t thank me. Thank an unprecedented eight-year military buildup.” - Bart Simpson

Two related stories crossed my screen yesterday. The first was this AP story about the first confirmed combat death in one of the military’s new Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAP in government acronym-speak). The second was Chalmers Johnson’s latest at TomDispatch about the truly bankrupting nature of the military budget. The two stories compliment and reinforce each other in a grim way.

The MRAP is an armored truck that is the Pentagon’s reaction to the (headline making) American casualties resulting from a different acronym, the Improvised Explosive Device (IED). They do a better job of protecting their passengers from bomb laced roadways than do Humvees. According to the article, the MRAPs cost between $500,000 and $1,000,000 each. Given the way large organizations tend to distort their own unflattering information I’d bet that $1,000,000 is a lot closer to the average figure than $500,000, though there’s a pretty good chance that even the higher number is low. Whatever the total cost, it is a very expensive military vehicle that exists solely because our previously existing very expensive military vehicles have proved ill suited to combat in Iraq.

The article extensively quotes Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell defending the vehicle’s performance, despite the death. Morrell’s money quote, “That attack has not … caused anyone to question the vehicle’s lifesaving capacity. To the contrary, the attack reaffirms their survivability,” is probably true, as far as it goes. But it ignores an old military aphorism, “If you can see it, you can hit it; if you can hit it, you can kill it.” As long as our troops are in harm’s way in Iraq they will be killed, no matter how many new vehicles we design or how much money we spend.

The Johnson article is an analysis of our unsustainable military budget. It is a compliment to his book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. (It just came out in paperback and I highly recommend it if you feel optimistic about the prospects of a national rejuvenation with a newly empowered Blue government next year). The conclusion of both the book and the article is that our military budget is literally ruining us. So much money is spent on the military that our civilian economy has become warped and less able to compete with other countries.

That depressing conclusion casts the construction and deployment of thousands of million-dollar trucks, to patrol a country we have no legitimate business occupying, in an unflattering light. The short term result, fewer American casualties, is certainly a worthwhile goal. But in the long term those are dollars that serve little to no purpose and will ultimately be just another line on the long and futile bill for the Iraq war. It will take all of us, including the guys in those heavily armored beasts, decades to pay that bill.

This is an excellent example of the inherent contradiction of American military power. We are enthusiastic about war, witness the temporary surge in popularity any time one of our presidents starts one, but we are not comfortable sending our troops into a meat grinder for no tangible purpose. But that is precisely the nature of imperial projects like our half-assed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars have tremendous costs in human and monetary terms, you’ll even see gaudy and romantic terms such as “blood” and “treasure” used to represent them. In the end though it’s just squandered dollars and broken bodies and at some point, no matter what the armchair colonialists say, we will no longer be able to afford one or both.

(I came across this shortly before I went to post. Sometimes it helps to post late in the day.)

“It’s just…it’s, it’s the same old tired gags, isn’t it?  I mean, let’s give the audience some credit.” - Bumblebee Man

I long assumed Hillary Clinton’s campaign was going to implode on itself, and it looked like that might be the case right up until the New Hampshire primary.  But she keeps winning things, and that makes me nervous because I’ve also long assumed that Hillary Clinton is about the only Blue candidate with a realistic chance of losing in November.  When you stop to lay it all out, the case against Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee is pretty damning.  So let’s go ahead and do that, shall we?

I’m looking strictly at elect ability in the general election here.  I’m sure she’s a very nice person in general and she’s supposed to be naturally inclined to get into the details of policy, which would be a welcome change from the current situation.  But I don’t care about any of that because it seems utterly irrelevant in the context of the larger election.

The first strike against her is her last name.  Every time I mention the fact that we might be about to go Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton it makes people cringe.  I remember how jarring it was, right after Bush the Younger was inaugurated, to hear people talk about “President Bush” in the present tense again.  The distinct whiff of banana republic, handing off the presidency between overly entitled families, was pretty hard to avoid.  And let’s not forget that restorations don’t tend to end well.  Certainly the Bush restoration has been a disaster.

In a year like 2008, where the Democrats have all the advantages, Clinton also strikes me as the one nominee who could scuttle things because she really is the only thing on which Republicans of all stripes can agree.  This has been pointed out so many times amongst politics fans that it’s almost trite, but it’s still true.  It boils down to some version of, “Screw the bitch” and it so excites Republican passions that it makes liberal loathing of Bush the Younger seem downright calm.  Our current president won two squeaker elections by turning out every person in American slightly inclined to vote Republican.  None of the Republican candidates can excite the voters the way Bush did, but Hillary Clinton sure can.

I’ve seen that point reversed, to make it a positive for Hillary Clinton.  The idea being that she and the rest of the Clinton team are the best Blues have at bare knuckle political fighting and in the general election that’s what it’s going to take.  Again, I find this logic puzzling.  A bare knuckled brawl plays to Republican strengths.  A candidate like say, Barack Obama, could ride the overwhelming tide of dissatisfaction; uplifting platitudes are exactly the right tactic to use.  If Hillary Clinton is the choice, it will certainly turn into an all out war and, let’s face it, there is no reason to believe that the Democrats can win that kind of campaign.

And be afraid, very afraid, if Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee.  He is the worst possible opponent for her.  The man got himself elected Governor of Massachusetts as a Republican and a mere two years later is serious position to grab the Republican nomination for President!  There’s nothing he can’t do.  The malleability of his positions is not a weakness, it is a strength, particularly in a general election against Hillary Clinton.  Romney has proved in the past that he can have crossover appeal, in the bluest of blue states no less.  We know Clinton has little to no crossover appeal.

Mr. Obama, sir, we need you buddy.

“Actually this is one of the nine states where Mr. Bush claims residency.” - Lisa Simpson

Mitt Romney lived to fight another day last night.  One of his three home states, Michigan, popped for him to the tune of almost 40%, allowing Romney, and his fire hose of money, to continue to bless the advertising and direct mail industries from coast to coast.  It’s been a great primary season, hasn’t it?  Three significant Republican contests and three different winners; two significant Democratic contests and two different winners with the white man waiting in the wings.  I love this country.  I really do.

It’s now been a week since New Hampshire and tomorrow will be two weeks since Iowa.  Campaigns in both parties have had to engage each other directly and pander to diverse crowds of voters for that entire time.  It’s fantastic.  And yet, there’s a rather sudden, and completely unnecessary, deadline coming up in only three weeks.  That would be the February 5th cluster fuck of primaries.

Clustered primary seasons are the reigning fashion in both parties.  The accepted conventional theory about how this came about boils down to the usual trope of blame the twenty-four hour media.  National coverage starts early and crowns a prohibitive favorite months before any votes are cast.  The conventions, once open contests of party strength, are now so valuable as promotional tools that they have become mere coronation ceremonies.  Therefore, if you want your state to have any say in the nominating process you’d better schedule the primary as early as you dare.  The Democratic Party of Michigan apparently dared too much and ended up utterly sidelined despite representing a large and reliably blue swing state.

The process is fouled.  Like the Bowl Championship Series in college football though, it’s so fouled that it can’t possibly last, but changing it could easily cause more problems than it solves.  The problem is as old as the Union.  Everyone wants to have a say, but we’re divided into big states and little states, which can’t be changed, and early states and late states, which can be changed.  The result is chaotic jockeying and that leads to things like a Democratic primary in Michigan that, despite it being the most wide open Democratic field in sixteen years, wasn’t worth printing ballots for, so small is the effect it’s likely to have on the outcome.

I don’t know enough about the structure of either party to make intelligent suggestions about how this process should work, but I’d like to offer up the last two weeks of campaigning as Exhibit A of how things ought to look.  The campaigns are under scrutiny from the unwashed masses, instead of just the political nerds, and we’ve learned a great deal about the candidates.  The steady pace of primary votes means that we regularly get real data, in ballots and delegates, with which to keep score.  This is vastly preferable to using poll numbers and fundraising totals.

Of course it’s all (probably) going to come to an end two days after the Super Bowl.  Super Tuesday will settle the nominees and we’ll go back to poll watching for five months.  It’s a pity.  We’ve had open and competitive races this year on both sides.  That’s unusual, but since one party is always going to be out of power and challenging there should be at least one real race per election.  The nominating process needs to accommodate prohibitive favorites as well as fierce bloodbaths.

Overloading one day with primaries means that little states get shit on at the expense of big ones.  Frontloading primaries means that later states get shit on at the expense of earlier ones.  It can’t be that hard to design a process that’s reasonably fair to everyone and not stupid and convoluted.

“You’re not just putting the new newspapers over the old ones, are you?” - Marge Simpson

On Tuesday John McCain won the New Hampshire primary for the second time this decade.  There has been much fretting on the left that, in the national race, he would be the most formidable opponent the Reds could nominate.  As someone who is fervently hoping for a massive Blue victory in November I have only one thing to say: please nominate this man.

In December of 2003, shortly before the last New Hampshire primary, the National Review ran a cover photo of an angry Howard Dean over the headline “Please Nominate this Man”.  It ran after Dean’s inevitability had peaked and begun to crack, but before his campaign died in Iowa and New Hampshire.  The basic point was that an anti-war candidate was doomed to failure in 2004.  The war was less than a year old and Saddam Hussein had just been captured.  War supporters were riding high and the denial about what was really going on was so widespread that the US Government was still refusing to use the word “insurgency” to describe the ballooning chaos between the rivers.

Flash forward four years, the war is still going on but we are at a similar moment of delusion for war supporters.  Iraq has receded from the headlines somewhat and the conventional political wisdom is that the war has become, or at the very least is becoming, a secondary issue.  The fashionable new topic is the economy, stupid.  The word “recession” is on the tip of many tongues and, the thinking goes, should the economy actually shrink in 2008 it would become the dominant issue almost by default.  This line of thinking is myopic, at best; the war isn’t going anywhere.

The temporary lessening of American deaths combined with a stunning lack of long term memory has put the national political conversation at ease over the war as an issue.  We’ve had more turning points and hopeful moments in Iraq that you can count and every single one of them has proved to be illusory.  This is just another mirage and it too will fade.

I’m not even going out on a limb when I say that.  It is a mathematical certainty.  All those extra troops we sent over there last year are beginning to come home.  We scraped the bottom of the barrel to muster even that force and it’s not sustainable.  The Iraq they leave is a different place than the one they found, but probably not for the better.

First and foremost there is the fact that we’ve been paying and arming groups that used to be shooting at us.  In the short term there have been benefits to this policy, after all they aren’t shooting at us (as much).  In the long term though, giving money and guns to Sunni groups which are fundamentally opposed to the Shiite government in the Green Zone sure doesn’t seem like a good idea.  Speaking of that government, the one that’s been sequestered inside the Green Zone since its conception, it’s as dysfunctional and powerless as ever.  There are numerous other problems as well, a massive and growing refugee population (internal and external), a lack of legitimate economic activity coupled with rampant criminality of every imaginable stripe, a distraught oil sector, and the daily butcher’s bill of civilian deaths to name but a few.

The increase in American troop levels that has probably caused the reduction in violence is, by design and necessity, temporary.  Other than blind hope there is no reason to believe that any structural progress has been made.  As our troops begin standing down and rotating home they are leaving an Iraq that is, if it’s even possible, probably more factionalized and more heavily armed than it was a year ago.  That unfortunate country has more problems than even a well informed American can keep up with, to say nothing of the average man on the street.

Which brings us back to John McCain.  Of the men most likely to win the Republican nomination, McCain has, by far, the most pro-war record.  Rudy Giuliani is a distant second and Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney have barely articulated a position on the war beyond meaningless platitudes about victory.  McCain, on the other hand, is an enthusiastic war supporter who just last Sunday went so far as to state that he would’ve invaded Iraq even knowing that there were no massive weapons to be found.

Last summer, when the, ahem, surge, didn’t look so rosy McCain’s campaign all but collapsed.  Yes he made some internal mistakes and personnel shakeups within a campaign are always played in the press as a death rattle, but McCain had done all he could to assume ownership of Mr. Bush’s war and it looked like political death.  That’s why it’s all I can do not to laugh when I hear people say that McCain would be at an advantage against someone like Hillary Clinton in a general election because the press loves him and hates her.

The byline brigade’s infatuation with McCain isn’t as justified as they would have you believe, but it isn’t as unjustified as liberal pundits say.  McCain really is honest, by political standards anyway, and he seems even more so when sharing a stage with the unchecked and barely disguised dishonesty of Giuliani, Huckabee and Romney.  But the reporter’s love of McCain was not powerful enough to stem the tide of negative stories about him being out of touch when the war tanked last summer.  And when the war tanks again, and it will, McCain will still be right there, up to his eyeballs in Iraq statements that the majority of the country finds abhorrent.

For the record I still don’t think McCain will be the nominee.  He’s almost as old as Bob Dole was in ‘96 and winning in New Hampshire doesn’t change the fact that he has, to this point, been a mediocre national campaigner.  I hope I’m wrong about that though, because I know I’m right about everything else.

Many conclusions will be drawn from Hillary Clinton’s surprise victory in New Hampshire yesterday.  The one I’m choosing to draw is that there is no point in following US election coverage.  I’ve long said that you can ignore political campaign coverage that happens months before any actual voting takes place.  Yesterday I learned that you can, in fact, ignore political campaign coverage that happens mere days before actual voting takes place.

My longstanding point about ignoring primary debates, media kerfuffles and polling numbers was based on the idea that anything that happens more than a couple of weeks in advance will have little to no meaning once voting actually starts.  Then we had the four days between Barack Obama’s victory in Iowa and Clinton’s victory in New Hampshire.  The general level of foolishness built on itself over the weekend to a crescendo on Monday and Tuesday where Obama had an insurmountable lead and there was rampant speculation that Clinton’s campaign would undergo a severe shakeup.  Then Clinton won and now the cycle is going to begin anew.

Now, it is certainly possible that factors unique to this race or to New Hampshire, a state that famously considers itself independent, caused the polls and the pundits to get this one so spectacularly wrong.  That it all happens in a very concentrated media environment when everyone has had too much coffee and too little sleep doesn’t help.  But the simple fact remains that every single poll I saw the last couple of days had Obama with a significant lead, every single story I read yesterday all but assumed that Clinton was going to lose, and every single one of them was wrong.

The only conclusion to be drawn is that pre election coverage is a complete and total waste of time.  The tools at the disposal of modern political coverage, from vaguely scientific polling to first hand accounts of stump speeches and crowd reactions, clearly don’t get the job done and if you don’t have the right tools it’s usually impossible to get any job done.  Obviously we cannot expect perfection, and predictions and prognostications are notoriously wrong, but the last four days are a very stark example of how election coverage can get carried away with itself.

Did the “Hillary is Doomed!” story cause more Clinton supporters to go to the polls?  Did she just have a remarkably effective campaign the last couple of days?  Did Edwards or Obama drop the ball and nobody noticed?  We’ll never know and we probably can’t know.  We have a tool for actually measuring what people think, they’re called ballots and everything else is just speculative masturbation.

Going forward that’s a good lesson to remember.  Whatever the storylines that dominate the coming days and weeks, whatever the poll numbers indicate, the only thing you can be certain of is that they are wrong.  So sit back, pour yourself a drink and make some popcorn.  Grab your remote and flip on CNN or turn on your computer and open up your favorite political website, because just like the psychic hotline, they’re for entertainment purposes only.

“Screw you guys.  I’m going home.” - Eric Cartman

Do you smell that?  On Thursday actual non-media citizens expressed their preference for our leaders, on Tuesday it’s going to happen again and the country is going smell like democracy all week.  What a refreshing change from the usual odor of contorted analysis and posturing outrage.  I, for one, was quite pleased with the results of the Iowa Caucuses.  The Democratic Caucus will probably turn out to be the more important in terms of who the next occupant of 1600 turns out to be for the simple reason that the Democratic nominee is more likely to win in November.  But the Republican Caucus is more interesting because it’s exposed a potentially major fissure in the Republican Party.

Mike Huckabee and his cross of piousness won, and won big, over the moneyed interests of Mitt Romney, and therein lies the problem for the national prospects of the Republican Party.  The Iowa Caucus has set up a clash on the Republican side between Huckabee, representing the salvation wing of the party, and Romney, representing the profit wing.  Both men are straight out of central casting, Huckabee is a devout believer who became a preacher before he became a politician, and Romney is a businessman who started life rich and made himself even richer.  They are both stereotypes to which their respective constituencies can easily relate.

Both of those constituencies could relate to George W. Bush, but he is no longer a candidate for office.  In that sense though he did live up to his promise to be a uniter, not a divider.  He united a Republican party that is otherwise quite at odds with itself.  In 2000 he was trusted by the guardians of both sides of the Republican philosophical divide.  He was a money man who went to both Harvard and Yale, a man with connections to the well propertied base of the party, but he was a also a born again Texan who sincerely believed in personal salvation and Jesus Christ.  There is no 2008 equivalent to 2000 George W. Bush.

Romney and Huckabee are each half of the equation, but neither can ever be the whole thing.  Moreover, each brings out the worst in the other camp, things that had previously gone unspoken.  Huckabee’s populist (by Republican standards anyway) rhetoric has nakedly exposed the anti-tax, business-at-all-cost conservatives for the unfeeling plutocrats that they really are.  Romney’s Mormonism has just as completely exposed the Bible thumpers as intolerant, religious bigots.  With Bush around as a rallying point those ugly truths were subsumed to the greater good of the party; now they are out for all to see.

Reagan and Bush the Elder paid lip service to a socially conservative agenda, but neither one of them was very religious and neither one of them really cared about abortion, school prayer, evolution, or any of that other stuff.  Bush the Younger, on the other hand, is religious and really does seem to care about those things.  That’s all well and good as long as it lasts, but the social conservatives have tasted power now and they do not want to go back to being patted on the head every four years and pointed toward a polling station.  They know that Romney, who was pro-choice until about two years ago, isn’t going to deliver anything they want.

Bush the Younger was equally giving to his fiscal base though.  He embraced supply side economics with a fervency that would’ve made Reagan blush.  His paymasters profited handsomely and love him for it, but those same policies have been disastrous for people making less than six figures.  Those are the people to whom Huckabee appeals and the big money people know that even if Huckabee can be brought to heel he won’t be a great friend to them the way Bush is or Romney would be.

The problem, if you’re a Republican, is that George W. Bush won the presidency by a narrow margin, twice, with the unconditional support of both groups.  Neither side can win if the other takes their toys and goes home, nor can they agree on a candidate.  While there is certainly overlap between the two groups, the hard core of each sees disaster if their man doesn’t win the nomination.  This is why John McCain is suddenly seen as a very real prospect again despite the fact that he is older than dirt and despised by a great many within his own party.

My hunch, and it is only a hunch, is that Romney will still be the nominee.  If there is one thing in American politics that is indisputably more powerful than Jesus it is the dollar.  The Republican Party was bought and paid for a long time ago and the Mormon from Massachusetts still has, despite his recent stumble in Iowa and faded poll numbers in New Hampshire, an enormous dollar advantage over Huckabee and McCain.  Romney, who appears to have no scruples whatsoever outside of not compromising his faith or his family, will eventually unleash the full power of his considerable financial resources, personal and otherwise, and that will be the end of that.

Come November though, none of those men will have the enthusiastic and unconditional support of both the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the people who take their Sabbath days seriously.  It’s not like this is the only issue dividing once united Republicans either.  Immigration, and the racism, sometimes quite overt, behind a lot of GOP thinking on the subject, springs to mind as well.  Only time will tell if this disunity has a serious effect on election results, and a lot can happen between now and November, but at the very least it’s a serious disadvantage in an era when even the tiniest things can swing elections.

“Aw Dad, it’s just a popularity contest.” - Bart Simpson

“Just a popularity contest!  Excuse me, what’s more important than popularity?” - Homer Simpson

Tomorrow is the Iowa Caucuses, and we can finally drop the idiotic idea that the minor differences between health plans and immigration plans put forward by each candidate, most of which they have probably never personally read, mean something.  This is not to say that there is no difference between the candidates, it just means that the information we have is laughably incomplete.  Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee would have vastly different presidencies, as would John Edwards and Barack Obama.  But we’ve got to pick our nominees somehow and in the United States of America in 2008, this is how we start the process.

If you head over to www.pollster.com you can see how each candidate is doing in Iowa and New Hampshire in various polls.  It’s the kind of information that you’re almost better off without because nobody actually knows what any of it means.  But it’s the stage dressing for the all important expectations game, which in turn sets up the headlines, spin and other vapid analysis that will fill the echo chamber on Friday morning.  What might some of that look like?

Republicans:

“Huckabee Wins Iowa” - Confirming his stunning rise in the polls over the last two months, Mike Huckabee has won the Republican Iowa Caucus.  The victory has positioned him as the clear cut frontrunner for the Republican nomination going into next week’s New Hampshire primary.

“Romney Wins Iowa” - Turning back what many had considered a serious challenge from Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney has won the Republican Iowa Caucus.  Once considered all but a shoe-in in Iowa, Romney has proved himself an able political fighter in turning away the challenge of the Baptist Minister.

“Anyone Else Wins Iowa” - In a stunning upset Rudy Giuliani/John McCain/Ron Paul/Fred Thompson has won the Republican Iowa Caucus.  Iowa front runners Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee have egg on their face this morning as last second campaigning and a shrewd ground operation by Rudy Giuliani/John McCain/Ron Paul/Fred Thompson has exposed their previous poll leads as media hyperbole.

Democrats:

“Hillary Clinton Wins Iowa” - In an historic first for a female presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton has won the Democratic Iowa Caucus, confirming her long running status as the odds on favorite to take the Democratic Nomination.  If she can win in New Hampshire, where she has been running neck and neck with Barack Obama, the Democratic nomination may be hers before any other votes are cast.

“Edwards Wins Iowa” - John Edwards’ campaign for the Oval Office has always been based on winning in Iowa.  Yesterday he did just that, and the question now becomes can he build on this victory in New Hampshire and beyond?

“Obama Wins Iowa” - In an historic first for a minority presidential candidate, Barack Obama has won the Democratic Iowa Caucus.  The victory has dealt a potentially deadly blow to John Edwards’ campaign and put Mr. Obama in position to do the same to Hillary Clinton next week in New Hampshire.

“Anyone Else Wins Iowa” - In a stunning upset Joe Biden/Christopher Dodd/Bill Richardson has won the Democratic Iowa Caucus leaving the three biggest names in this campaign, Clinton, Edwards and Obama, scrambling to get their campaigns back on track before any further damage can be done in New Hampshire.

As puerile and stupid as most of the above is, it’s roughly what we’re going to be in store for come Friday.  It might get a little muddy if the top spot is extremely close and two or more campaigns try to claim victory, but it would have to be really close for any candidate to risk looking like a sore loser.

There are certainly a lot of justifiable criticisms of the Iowa Caucuses (they’re basically a media invention, what makes Iowa so special anyway?, nothing is really at stake, the voting rules are arcane, etcetera), but what it comes down to is that this is the first chance ordinary citizens, not paid media people or on-line loudmouths, have to express support in a structured and reasonably fair system.  We’ll see what happens tomorrow night.