At this juncture, a week and a half before the Iowa caucuses, polls are notoriously variable. Most people this time around are aware that only a small percentage of voters actually show up on what’s generally a bitter-cold January night to stand around for a couple of hours and take a public position, possibly switching to their second choice if the first isn’t popular enough. Since choosing a reasonable sample is critical to having polls be accurate, this difficulty means that there’s really no telling what’ll happen.

Thus I make bold to post my evaluations, as likely as everyone else’s to prove wrong.

To me the big story right now is the rise of Huckabee. He’s got an interesting set of qualities: personable, quick and humorous on his feet, the whole losing-100-pounds thing, and a record that’s sufficiently diverse to allow him to court opposing constituencies simultaneously. Even people who are usually particularly sensitive to right-wing Christianity in politics find him likeable, and if you’ve seen him on the sorely-missed Colbert Report you can see why. True, he doesn’t believe in evolution, but on the other hand he wants to educate every child, even if the parents are illegal immigrants. He’s got a wide appeal, particularly given the quality of the Republican opposition. He’ll sew up the evangelical vote, which is deserting Bush-style Republicans in droves.

McCain is making his expected third-quarter run. I put him around third place now, though that’s based more on my guess about New Hampshire and the Big Day than Iowa, where he pulled out some time ago and is not likely to do well. Giuliani’s tanking nationally, thank God. There was no moment at which Thompson was a real candidate. Ron Paul can make valuable noise and afflict the comfortable to some extent, but his policies would clearly fail to comfort the afflicted. Taking out the government would remove the only shield, ineffective though it’s been, between individuals and the new Leviathan, the corporation. If all the policies Paul advocates were put into effect, how long would it take for the robber barons of the biotech age to arise?

It looks to me like it’s Governor Hair Varnish versus Governor Christian Leader, and in that contest Iowa evangelicals are likely to make the difference.

Given my Edwards bias, it’s harder for me to evaluate the Democratic race. Clearly the polls and the speculators are moving away from Clinton, with most of the benefit going to Obama. This seems a natural result of the public’s early lack of knowledge of candidates’ positions gradually being rectified as the election season actually takes hold. When polls showed the public ranking Clinton as the most liberal of the top-tier Democrats, she was way ahead. Now that people are seeing her in action, and the press is catching her husband dissembling, memories pop up of the bad parts of the good old days, and we’re reminded of the rose-colored glasses kindly provided by the Bush administration for looking rearward.

I’d say there are three main questions about the Democrats. Will the Republican wing of the Democratic party be represented by Clinton or Obama? Will any of the worthy occupants of the second tier break through and get more of a hearing? Will the populist Democratic wing gain some sort of momentum from extensive campaigning in Iowa’s famously personal political style, and gain on or surpass the DLC?

My guess is Obama, no, and some. Naturally I’m rooting for a yes on the second and third questions. But the war machine, in control of the Republicans, also exercises a huge influence on the Democrats, and my guess is that it will be able to live with uniting behind Obama rather than losing with Clinton. At all costs Edwards must not be allowed to continue his class-warfare advocacy.

The last thing today’s Democratic party wants is more FDR-style economics.

Factions in both parties are currently struggling over who gets to establish the central narrative. Right now it looks like the evangelicals are winning among Iowa Republicans, which means Huckabee. In New Hampshire there are far fewer evangelicals and things are likely to be different. For the Democrats it’s cloudier, in part because the actual differences in policies, and in backer and donor constituencies, haven’t been reported in nearly as much detail as the horserace aspect, a standard political reporter’s tool to get home or to the bar a little early; but largely because a popular desire for change is balanced by others for experience and trustworthiness, with the change vote splitting based on gut reactions and tribal politics as well as policy evaluations. Many Democrats, along with some independents, are in my view looking for the candidate who can win the general election but will change, you know, things, the way stuff is generally done in Washington.

Or perhaps I’m projecting. Now that I put it that way, it’s my reasoning for supporting Edwards over Kucinich, who in many ways is a better embodiment of my views than any other active candidate. For example, Kucinich is straightforward about his health plan: single payer, the one and only correct answer. Edwards seems to me to be playing a political game with his plan, which includes the insurance corporations but forces them to compete in an open market with the government, allowing people to buy insurance or to sign up for government-organized single-payer care. Given the companies’ long-held claims of superior efficiency, you might think they’d welcome such a challenge, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

In other words, the Edwards plan looks like an attempt to pass something that allows single-payer while invalidating the basic argument of the insurance companies. And given the vagaries of Congress, such a tricky approach is much more likely to succeed than a more honest head-on attempt to create single-payer; not guaranteed, by any means, but conceivable. To get reasonable health care, we’ll have to fight the insurance and drug companies and the HMOs, an industry with immense wealth and power. My guess is we’re most likely to beat them by being honest and being right. It’ll be a battle comparable to trying to end the war, except that more Americans will be directly victimized, physically and economically, by a future health-care failure than by the existing one in Iraq.

If I’m right about the Republicans in Iowa going for Huckabee, the next corollary is that he could be a particularly tough opponent for the Democrats to beat. He’ll grab the right-wing Christians, both the hardest-core Bush supporters and the disillusioned. If he manages somehow to bring the corporate/country-club wing of the Republican party on board his Christian Leader train, he could mobilize the old Rovian coalition, Ron Paul’s takedown notwithstanding. Obama-Huckabee could have some ugly undertones.

As to the Democrats, pro-changers seem to be moving away from Clinton toward Obama, at least those who can imagine Oprah as a revolutionary. Edwards is basing his hopes on having visited all 99 Iowa counties twice, and the rural counties have disproportionate influence on the outcome in these caucuses.

If Clinton is not either first or very close second, her campaign’s in trouble, and she’ll need a convincing victory in New Hampshire. At this point I think Obama’s momentum requires pretty much the same, but his campaign wouldn’t be dead in the water if he finished third, having never run on his inevitability to begin with. Edwards needs a first or close second to continue in the top tier. He might survive a close third if the votes are split nearly evenly among the top three; he’s got a bit of good press recently, in case he happens to win. But if Biden or Dodd beats him he may as well decamp to North Carolina. I’d love to see Kucinich make a run — I re-registered as a Democrat four years ago so I could vote for him — but I don’t know how clearly his message has reached the caucus-goers. Richardson continues to be a prime candidate for VP, or SecState.

Finally, to the wonderful Bad Attitudes community, and especially our friend Bill O’Reilly, I wish Happy Holidays!

Posted by Chuck Dupree at December 23, 2007 05:24 PM

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