Iowa Caucus: The Republicans
(Captain's Quarters) - This started off sounding like the Super Bowl -- the big-money Immovable Object meeting the grassroots Unstoppable Force. Iowans turned it into the usual kind of Super Bowl, a laugher, as Mike Huckabee stunned Mitt Romney with a nine-point win. Huckabee beat Romney by a much wider margin than anyone predicted, even larger than the five-point gap that I posted earlier this evening.
posted by BP News Bureau | 10:17 AM
4 Comments:
From National Review Online:
Was just talking with a friend who is a shrewd political analyst and who is always worth listening to. He thinks Romney's loss is basically irrecoverable after spending so much and getting beaten by an under-funded candidate who was an unknown not too long ago by nine points. In the end, the devastating Huckabee line was the one about voting for the candidate who seems like someone you work with rather than someone who laid you off. Both he and Obama rejected their party's establishments and old-style politics. Obama rejected Clintonian triangulation and Edwards-style netroots rage. Huckabee rejected (at least notionally) Rovian zero-sum politics and the Washington GOP establishment. My friend thinks Huckabee has staying power and is going to be strong in South Carolina and Florida. Evangelicals are now fully vested in him, so he has a strong base going forward. Thompson stays in, but is going to have trouble ever eclipsing Huckabee. Rudy is going to have real trouble making the case he can unite the party in general as a pro-choicer after the rise of Huckabee. The advantage McCain has is that he is naturally suited to tap into the Huckabee change message—the call for cross-partisan cooperation and the distaste for the Washington establishment. This is a case where something old can perhaps become new again. But McCain has to make himself acceptable to conservatives and attack Romney from the right. If he makes the kind of mistakes he did in 2000, he creates the possibility of Huckabee winning the nomination. Another problem for Giuliani is that through his ferocious attacks on Hillary, which seemed so shrewd all year long, he has made himself a partisan figure in a way that Huckabee and McCain aren't and roughly identified himself with the Bush-Clinton politics of the past. Just one take...
From National Review Online:
"Irrecoverable?"
It's one cold night in Iowa, dude.
Now it may be that conservatives are cold to Romney too. But I'd give it beyond Iowa for that to shake out. Romney sells himself as a turnaround artist. Hey, show us. Maybe he is.
Huckabee coming out of nowhere should be a motivator to the others. There are still choices to be made here and the choices have not been made for conservatives by Iowa or money or whomever the conventional chattering wisdom lines up for.
I think Romney should not be counted out. And I think if you're convinced McCain has to be the guy, why can't Fred be the guy? Why can't Rudy get right? I'm just saying we had one caucus night — a two-hour process ? — and this election isn't over.
Like Peter Gabriel sang, Don't Give Up!
From National Review Online:
Huckabee took 14% of the vote and came in fourth in the Iowa caucus among non-evangelicals according to the NBC Republican exit poll [other polls come out about the same]. Huckabee's principle voting block was female born-again Christian Republicans living in non-urban rural areas with a population below 10,000. I dearly love such people, but demographically in the country at large there aren't that many of them.
When Huckabee moves out of caucus Iowa and into primary state America, he's going to get killed.
What anonymous said.
I suspect more libertarian-leaning states like New Hampshire and South Carolina will reject Huckabee's socialism-with-a-bible.
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