Since I'm doing a (mostly) political blog here, I suppose I'm somehow obligated by whatever higher code it is to which we in the "blogosphere" are responsible to post something about the Iowa caucuses.
I'm not looking for any Larger Meaning or Grand Themes in the Iowa results. They're important in the winnowing process that goes on in the Presidential campaign, because in the end there can be only one nominee. With Gephardt now out, it looks like the Democratic field is essentially down to John Kerry, Howard Dean, the General (Wesley Clark) and John Edwards. I'll be surprised if Edwards reminds in that company as long as the other three. But voters can be surprising.
One strain of tea-leaf reading I've seen after Iowa is the idea that Kerry's and Edwards' surprisingly strong showings indicate that the Iraq War is losing potency as an issue. This line of interpretation strikes me more as the typical laziness of our political reporters than anything else. I said in an earlier post that reading political polls gives me hives, in no small part because pollsters do such a poor job of measuring the political effects of foreign policy issues.
Billmon gives us a little case study of how poor a job journalists often do with the foreign policy polling data they do have.
My instinct on the war issue is similar to Steve Gilliard's: "It doesn't matter who wins the early primaries in the US because it seems the Iraqi primaries are going to be the ones which matter. Ten miles of Shias and Sunnis marching in Baghdad. I think that's going to be a problem for Bush."
Actually, I wouldn't go quite that far. The Democrats need strong traction on the national security issue. It seems to me that the General and Kerry, the other tough-dove candidate, are best positioned to provide that. Dean can pull it off, and maybe Edwards can, as well. At least the two candidates whose were the most supportive of Bush's preventive war policy, Gephardt and Lieberman, haven't made much of a showing in the Democratic contest.
No comments:
Post a Comment