Boston Cod

Iowa Caucuses: High Winds And Bluster Predicted For The MidWest

Have your shovels ready. We're getting a good blow tonight!

By Greg O'Brien, Codfish Press

The fact that a single digit turnout in a rural Midwest state to elect delegates to a county convention designates the pole position in a presidential race is proof positive that the campaign for the nation's highest office is far more about spin than substance.I'm Greg O'Brien and I approved this message. While the media waits today, as political storm clouds gather over Iowa, to coronate the next Republican and Democratic presidential frontrunners, derailing the candidacies of not-ready-for-prime-time players and boosting the campaigns of second place finishers, the vote will likely have more to do with political grit than ideas or a statewide consensus. But by the time the cameras rolls and headlines roar at the finish line, an attention-deficit American public will assume the winners embody the best of field. Perception, as the late Tip O'Neill would say, is reality, and reality-real or imagined-has wings to the Granite State.

Depending on what polls you read and how one discerns the methodology, both the Republican and Democrat contests are as tight this morning as a Des Moines cab ride to the airport on Friday. Conventional political wisdom has Democrats Sen. Barack Obama, Sen. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards all close to the margin of error, and Republicans Mitt Romney and upstart Mike Huckabee in a snowball fight, with Romney hurling ice balls and a ducking Huckabee citing scripture about turning the other cheek. "If a man gains the whole world and loses his soul, what does it profit him," the former Arkansas governor and Baptist preacher told reporters, a passage from a politician on the lip of a defining caucus that appears to come more from a political playbook than the Good Book.

In spite of one of the most completive fields since the first Iowa caucuses in 1972, today's turnout is expected to be underwhelming; fewer than six percent of the state's eligible voters turned out in 2004 to gather in livings rooms and school gyms to select delegates to county conventions-"the next step," as Reuters puts it, "in a drawn-out process that ends in the spring with selection of state delegates to the national nominating conventions next summer." On the surface, at least, this is about as meaningful as planting corn in February, and yet the candidates with the biggest snow shovels, largest fleet of vans, most sophisticated phone banking and best get-out-the-vote stratagems will somehow be (mis)perceived nationwide as the ones with the winning strategies for extricating ourselves from Iraq, stabilizing a volatile economy that is foreclosing on home mortgages at an distressing pace, and protecting the homeland from further terrorist aggressions now in the planning stages. "In the history of these caucuses, no candidate who has ever finished worse than third among the candidates has even gone on to win the nomination," David Yepsen, veteran political consultant for The Des Moines Register, told ABC news.

The fact that a single digit turnout in a rural Midwest state to elect delegates to a county convention designates the pole position in a presidential race is proof positive that the campaign for the nation's highest office is far more about spin than substance. Have your shovels ready. We're getting a good blow tonight!