OUT OF THE GATE: OBAMA MAKES HISTORY - January 5, 2008

The first round in the US presidential nomination race is over, and Iowa caucusgoers served up a feast for political commentators by delivering wins to the two insurgents in the presidential nomination races, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee. Had Hillary Clinton won in Iowa, she would have been a nearly prohibitive favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination. Now she will have to fight for it, with the odds perhaps somewhat against her. (Nevertheless she was slightly favored at online betting sites this morning.) Had Mitt Romney won on the Republican side, he would have been a clear favorite for the GOP nomination. On the Democratic side the race is now more clearly defined, though its outcome is uncertain. On the Republican side, the nomination race has been left more complicated than ever.

The big winner of the night was Obama, who achieved nothing less than a political miracle. Since the 1970s, Democratic candidates running insurgent campaigns have persuaded themselves that "the college kids" – younger voters, especially but by no means only college students – would come out for them in droves. It never happened, the most recent and familiar victim being Howard Dean in 2004. This time,

however, the college kids showed up in droves, along with

other younger voters, giving Obama the margin that lifted

him from a tie to a solid and convincing win.

  
In recent years the only candidates who have been notably successful at bringing out young voters in large numbers have been celebrities who ran as outsiders to the entire political process – wrestler Jesse Ventura, elected governor of Minnesota as a third-party candidate in 1999, and movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, elected governor of California as a Republican, but having only loose ties to his party. Obama's campaign has much in common with these in offering a gauzy feel-good revolution, a way to vote against the entire political establishment.

   
The remarkable difference is that Barack Obama is not a celebrity outsider. His ascent, though rapid, follows a traditional path for rising Democratic politicians: training in law and community work, state legislature, Senate seat, presidential bid. Yet because he is new on the national political scene, he is not directly linked to any controversy of recent years. He is not even an antiwar candidate, in the sense understood since the Vietnam era. Although Obama made a speech opposing the Iraq war at its outset, the war was not a central theme in his campaign, but rather a broader metaphor for the failure of "Washington thinking," which he offers to supplant.

   
In Iowa, Obama worked political magic. The question in the Democratic primary race now is whether he can repeat it. Although John Edwards finished second in Iowa, fractionally ahead of Hillary Clinton, he has been running a distant third in New Hampshire. Without a surprise surge there, for which Iowa gave him no momentum, his prospects are grim. Hillary Clinton, though wounded, has much better prospects for recovery.

  
The last polls before the Iowa caucuses showed her holding a narrow lead in New Hampshire and a large lead nationally. These leads will certainly erode, but short of a catastrophic collapse Hillary has resources for a comeback, either in New Hampshire or in the multi-state Super Tuesday primary on February 5 in which more than half the delegates will be chosen. A quick win in New Hampshire, though not restoring her former media-bestowed "inevitability," would once more make her the strong favorite by showing the limits of Obama's magic and stalling his momentum.

  
On the Republican side, the win also went to an insurgent candidate, Arkansas governor and Baptist minister Mike Huckabee. In what polling had shown as a close race he handily beat former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, in spite of having little money or organization. This victory was fueled largely by Huckabee's fellow evangelical Christians, well-represented among Iowa Republicans, and it has further complicated rather than simplified the GOP nomination contest. Of all the serious Republican candidates, Huckabee embodies the religious conservatism on which the GOP has come to depend in elections, yet he arouses the greatest unease among the party's power brokers and its influential economic conservatives, and is still regarded as a longshot for the Republican nomination.
   

Huckabee has few prospects in secular-minded New Hampshire, but he can look forward to the primary in South Carolina, where religious conservatives are again a major force in the GOP. Romney, who predicated his strategy on early wins, now critically needs a win in New Hampshire next Tuesday. His chief rival there will be John McCain – who a few months ago was all but written off a few months ago in the Republican contest. McCain's fortunes have revived as Rudy Guliani's declined, and as Republicans struggled to find a candidate they can rally around.
   

In Iowa the Democratic and GOP races took place in separate universes; nothing that happened on one side had any bearing on the other. In New Hampshire the two parties' nomination races are likely to interact. McCain's strength in New Hampshire, as in 2000, comes largely from independents – but New Hampshire independents, who can choose to vote in either party's primary race, are also a prime target for the Obama campaign. Thus a strong surge of independents toward Obama may stall McCain's rise in New Hampshire, or vice versa.
   

Apart from their results, the Iowa caucuses sent a powerful message about the two parties' enthusiasm levels at the opening gun of the 2008 election season. Although the Republican caucuses had a record , it was dwarfed by turnout for the Democratic caucuses, some 240,000 – nearly twice as much as in 2004, and more than twice the GOP turnout of 115,000. While Obama brought the most excitement and left with the most votes, Democratic enthusiasm transcends him. Indeed, his post-partisan and anti-political messages may, if he is the nominee, become the vehicle of a partisan Democratic sweep, a possibility not lost on his supporters and probably not lost on his strategists. On the Republican side the best news is that it is ten months to the general election, enough time for a rudderless, divided, and dispirited party to find its footing in what, for now, looks like a decidedly unfriendly political environment.

Rick Robinson

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Author of the article holds B.A. degree in Economics from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and M.A. degree in English from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California . Mr. Robinson worked as a county-level campaigner in Dukakis (1988) and Clinton (1992) presidential campaigns. He presently works as a journalist and political commentator.

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