Re: The Iowa caucuses, I think far too much is made of them, especially since nobody ever gets a clear majority. Sure Obama and Huckabee "won," until you consider that 62% of Democrats preferred someone else to Obama, and 66% of Republicans preferred someone else to Huckabee.
The other thing is that the number of people who actually participate in the caucuses is ridiculously small, and almost all of them are half-crazed political junkies of one stripe or another. The normal people were at home, watching the Orange Bowl or having dinner with their families.
I think Huckabee got fewer than 45,000 votes in a state of 3 miillion people. The anecdotal evidence is that Democrat turnout was about twice as high as the Republicans, since the Iowa nutroots types were more "fired up," but that would mean that Obama got maybe 100,000 votes at most.
The Democrats don't release the actual vote counts from their caucuses, just the delegate counts, which is hardly a transparent system. I heard some convoluted explanation this morning on the talk radio show, and apparently the delegate counts aren't completely congruent with the number of votes the candidates actually received. Some animals are more equal than others, apparently, and some voters are, too, making the party name an oxymoron. At least there wasn't a People's Soviet Duma involved, as far as I know.
But Hillary has lost her aura of inevitability. I can't foresee any
combination of circumstances that would result in me voting for any of the Democrat candidates in November, but of all of them, she would probably be the least dangerous to the country.
This is not to say that I don't think that her socialist policies would be bad for the country, but I think that the rest of them would likely be worse. Hillary is cold and vindictive, and any country that attacked us on her watch could expect prompt retaliation. I don't think that would be the case under Obama, and it certainly wouldn't be the case under Edwards, who would probably make Carter seem bold and bellicose by comparison.
Obama gives a nice speech, but his record is far to the left of Hillary's, which is a bad thing. An Obama administration's policies would likely be even more collectivist and confiscatory than a Hillary administration would be, and more likely to try to give away American sovereignty and prosperity to unaccountable international organizations like the U.N.under boondoggles like "fighting climate change."
