Iowa and Beyond

by Steve Soto

First off, Happy New Year everyone! I hope all of you, even our GOP friends, have a safe and healthy 2008.

Secondly, thanks to Turkana and the rest of the TLC editors for making my absence from these pages irrelevant. I hoped that I could step away from the demands of daily blogging, do some book planning and writing, and focus on a new job for several months without it negatively impacting TLC, and thanks to their hard work, my hopes have been realized.

Third, and most significantly, Obama's win in Iowa although only eight points over both Edwards and Clinton was important because he won independents, women, and young voters amongst a large turnout. Even worse for Clinton and Edwards is the fact that the independent vote is much larger in New Hampshire and the contest follows too closely for either to slow down the media-fed Obama juggernaut. After Iowa, supporting Obama as a race-blind change agent is now a mainstream notion. All Hillary can do now is talk about experience and who best can actually deliver change, but at a time when the media narrative and his campaign have already branded him as the fresh new face of generational change and more importantly, the anti-Hillary.

The latest NH daily tracking poll from Zogby for Reuters and CSPAN through yesterday shows Hillary sticking at 32% and Obama up 2 points to 28%, with Edwards stuck at 20%. But Rasmussen's NH tracking poll out this morning now shows Obama shooting past Hillary to a ten-point lead, 37%-27%. Given that there is so little time between today and the primary, Hillary doesn't have time to reverse that, and a loss to Obama of any size in NH will spin the narrative even further to her disadvantage leading into South Carolina. He has the money and the organization, and most importantly the message and media storyline to remain the frontrunner even in the big states to come.

Experience and inevitability were always Hillary's biggest selling points. Yet in hindsight eight years of a malignant Bush/Cheney foreign policy by experienced criminals rendered the first selling point suspect. Hillary herself undermined the latter argument by prematurely making Obama the Anyone But Hillary candidate. I was laughed at several weeks ago when I argued that Hillary should have read the tea leaves and started portraying herself as the underdog and Obama as the frontrunner, when doing so at the time could have set the narratives for a bad showing in Iowa and allowed her breathing room to rethink her approach before the rush of early contests made this impossible to do it real time.

In my mind, the odds are now better than 50-50 that Obama heads to Denver as the front runner, if for no other reason than Hillary's attempts to stop it from happening may now only drive her numbers lower. How does a Democratic ticket headed by Obama do against a splintered GOP and ticket headed by a Mike Huckabee? Very well, leading to a likely Democratic romp at both ends Pennsylvania Avenue. But how does Obama do against John McCain, especially if Pakistan melts down something else overseas gets worse than it is already?