By Jay D. Homnick on 1.4.08 @ 12:06AM
Iowa has become a four-letter word.
Free, free, free at last.
I have friends in Iowa, this magazine has lovely subscribers in
that state, we have nothing but respect for its environs and
denizens and ambience; we even harbor a grudging admiration for its
successful ethanol scam skimming Treasury funds lo these decades;
but none of us in the other 49 want to hear another word out of
Iowa for the next four years. Enough already with the
leather-skinned guys in the flannel shirts sitting in diners
waiting for, in servile succession, the campaign guys to tout the
candidate, the candidates to tout the state, and the reporters to
solicit the impressions -- thereby to tout the race. We have had
enough homespun folksy wisdom from the horny-handed farmers to last
several lifetimes. After keeping an eye like a hawk on the state
for several months, I fully intend to ignore it with all my
strength for several years.
This year, more than in past cycles, some of the ponderous
voices in media, i.e. editorial page writers, have had enough, and
loudly so. The prelude to the caucus was raucous in gripes against
the disproportionate clout accorded to a few people in one random
state. Iowa is becoming a four-letter word.
That being said, I would like to offer an eccentric view to the
effect that a paradoxical situation occurred in this particular
year's event which undercut its meaningfulness. This anomaly will
benefit no one more than the First Lady, Senator and best-selling
authoress, H. Rodham Clinton. This candidate would have been the
victim of an utter demolition in Iowa after finishing third in the
balloting. Starting as a favorite and sinking so igneously and
ignominiously generally bodes ill for Presidential aspirants.
Finishing tertiary in the primary often leaves one in a
quandary.
And yet this confounded woman, if we may echo Nero Wolfe in our
chagrin, has caught yet another in a lifelong series of lucky
breaks. Why? Because the Republican winner was Huckabee.
Now I am sure Mike is a lovely fellow, and in his enthusiasm he
may be forgiven his Jay Leno guitar strumming. Who among us has not
executed some equally goofy maneuver to attract the female vote?
Still, I know one thing about him for sure, the same thing every
level-headed political realist knows. His chances of winning the
Republican nomination are equivalent to the likelihood that a
snowball will survive the shipping over to Hades. He is having his
Paul Tsongas moment, a speed bump on the not-so-long and
not-so-winding road to oblivion. He has assured himself of his own
private footnote in the history books and he might as well quit now
while he is ahead.
Had Obama defeated Clinton on a night in which a prominent
Republican contender took a first confident stride toward triumph,
it would have echoed loudly across the fruited plain, the amber
waves of grain, the loamy prairie soil...and the reeking vats of
ethanol. Instead, all that happened, one hundred million campaign
dollars later, is that Iowans will now be gently mocked in
monologues and monographs everywhere for bringing a quirky
sensibility to the serious business of choosing a leader. This is
as big a write-off as if a write-in won.
Once again, it begins to look that she who laughs last -- not to
mention shrillest and most discordantly -- will laugh best. Obama
could theoretically not only fail to gain ground by virtue of this
victory, he could lose ground. His name will be bound to Huckabee's
as the odd couple who caught the idiosyncratic idiom of those
idiots in that state, what's-its-name, you know, the one with the
caucuses.
Of course, this is a consummation devoutly not to be wished. Our
flesh has already been heir to a thousand natural shocks from that
It-Takes-A-Hamlet woman, and we had begun perchance to dream. Maybe
there could be a tomorrow without her in the public eye and, more
blissfully still, without her in the public ear. Maybe we could
have a real election between earnest people who genuinely seek the
public good and who speak passionately to our better angels. Maybe
she could be upset in the primary so we will not have to be upset
later.
Not in Iowa, though. That went from debate to debacle. Yet there
is always tomorrow. Perhaps some other state, another prickly
individualist but one with its feet on the ground, can do her in.
Shot by the voting booth in the political theater, so to speak.
Take me away, then, to a woodsy Northeastern hideaway with at least
a dozen letters in its name. My freedom was short-lived.
topics:
Business, Books, Iran, NATO, Oil
