Monday, January 07, 2008

Is Change the New Black?

What does Obama’s win in Iowa tell us about us? Is a rally arising on the left? A new movement among the Democrats to dump last century’s baggage may (or may not) make this a year’s selection process one to remember but it is certainly more than we pundits and bloggers could ever have asked for. Perhaps the non-appearance of any defined goals for the change made the movement’s rise missed our notice, although we were getting indications by the popularity of Obama in those incessant polls that MSN must have to have news. When dog bite is the only news you got, get yourself a dog that bites.

If the voters of New Hampshire vote for change, we got ourselves a movement. Ink will run, trees felled, and coal burned spreading the word back and forth explaining, dissecting, and commenting ad infinitum on this Change that is in the air now that anyone can see it – and report on it. Let’s hope it doesn’t all end in a scream, and son-of-change doesn’t rise up to take its place. (Or would that be daughter-of-change?)

New Hampshire – maybe even Tsunami Tuesday – could result in a race between the Machine, the Progressive, and Mr. Change. Obliviously to anyone familiar with the punditry, the Machine is Clinton. She’s got the org, the money, the names, and what comes as close as we are going to get today, a political machine. And don’t forget the experience. She was selling that in Iowa, but the young voters were not buying it. They bought change.

The Progressive for anyone needing a scorecard is Edwards. Running in the old, down home political style that has been used since the populists and progressives began at the dawn of the previous century. Like any good progressive, farmers, workers – as usual in the form of union organizations – and the poor make up his grassroots campaign. Progressivism has always been a hit with the Democrats but hardly a winner.

It may take a village for us all the live a normal life but it takes a Great Depression for a progressive to get in the White House.

How Mr. Change’s campaign will affect the winter and spring of 2008 is going to be the thing to watch. It may all be a fizzle by the end of January, but we may roar into February like some political lion and roar out that way all way up to the presidential election in November.

And what’s happening over on the Republican side with Huckabee taking Iowa? If Iowa revels a movement is afoot among the Democrats, the Republican results proves how unimportant Iowa should be considered. Let’s see…a major candidate that is so catering to the self-righteous right that this supposedly well-educated man declared in a public forum that he doesn’t believe in evolution won in a state that is predominated by just the kind of people to which his declaration was targeted.

Will the cold, hard New Englanders send Huckabee back to the land of the self-righteous were they can all pray for a the miracle they know will occur if they all pray long enough and hard enough to make it happen? Pray God protect us from faith based government.

Looks like the real race on the Republican side is between McCain and Romney. We got all kinds of polls but we will just have to wait until the official poll, the one that selects delegates to see what the thinking of the Republicans are for 2008. However, McCain and Obama are drawing water from the same well of independents to over come their own parties’ rank and file which if I’m reading the more clued-up pundits will support Romney and Clinton. Whoever draws the independents will win – or do better than expectation which what today’s primary news is all about.


We must wait for Tuesday to see. Stay tuned.

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