After a campaign that's so far lasted eight million days, in which over the course of 550 televised debates the 139 Republican candidates have yelled furiously at each other while simultaneously blaming everything that's ever happened or will ever happen on Barack Obama, in Iowa on Monday night actual voters caucused, and all of the sudden we moved beyond the realm of obsessive media speculation into actual important stuff actually happening. The results from Iowa were pretty fascinating, don't you think? I'm gonna throw in my two cents.
The analyses I've read today want to claim that what happened is a terrible loss for Trump, but I'm not persuaded that Cruz's 27% to Trump's 24% is that big a deal. We already knew that Cruz had a sharp lead among Iowa's sizable evangelical conservative population. What else were we expecting? This narrow win for Cruz hardly presages Trump's collapse. Should Trump underperform in New Hampshire, it's a different story, but it's much too early to either anoint Cruz champion or compose dark threnodies for Trump's campaign. And I don't even know what to say about Rubio's showing. "Congratulations?"
On the Democratic side, Hillary's coronation has been put completely on hold. Sanders went from barely registering in the polls to forcing essentially a tie in a state that structurally should have belonged to Hillary. With Sanders apparently holding a big lead in the polls in New Hampshire, we might have a very different narrative about this race after next Tuesday's primary.
I admit there's nothing in the above analysis that you couldn't read somewhere else (though doubtless my elegant sentences and interesting word usements delight and astonish). So I will assert this: what is most fascinating about this race is that in this first caucus, fifty percent of the vote on both sides went to candidates who are widely considered too ideologically extreme to have any chance in the general election. But after yesterday's results it can no longer be considered an impossibility that we end up with Trump or Cruz as the Republican nominee and Sanders as the Democrat, and should that happen, well, someone has to win the general election.
The popular (and, I think, correct) narrative explaining the appeal of both Sanders and Trump (a narrative fits Cruz less well) is that they both appear as outsiders to the current egregiously corrupt status quo. While Trump's bonafides as defender of the little guy seem, ahem, questionable, it's hardly for me to question Republican primary voters on what's motivating their choice, and apparently the common description that his fans offer about him is that "he's his own person." Which is actually kind of hard to deny. Given that every single pundit or even halfway informed commentator (including myself) figured that his unscripted intemperance would lead to his downfall and has been proved wrong, well, certainly it genuinely appears that a substantial percentage of voters value his willingness to speak his mind, irrespective of little things like appropriateness and facts. On the other side of the spectrum, Sanders is a self-described socialist who whole candidacy is predicated on responding to the vast gulf of inequality our country currently is laboring under.
(I'm sure you've read the same pieces I have about Bloomberg possibly stepping into the vacant political center. He has both experience, as well as the financial resources to bankroll his own run. Here it is worth asking if a plutocrat attempting to claim the middle of the political spectrum is really the answer to what increasingly seems to be the key narrative of this election. Do Bloomberg and his billions really represent the way forward when dealing with a polity that feels disenfranchised by the concentration of wealth and power in our country?) (Never mind that it's perplexing that billionaire Trump has managed to find a way to fit into this same narrative.)
For those of us who see the shocking concentration of wealth and power (since Citizens United, ever-more-increasingly the same thing) as the most important issue facing our country, and for those of us who understand that this isn't a partisan problem but corrupts the entirety of our political process and political institutions, that it appears that dismay/disgust with this development has become a (the?) motivating issue for a substantial percentage of voters on both sides of the political divide can only be welcome. Now is the time to act and act boldly. No president, irrespective of party, is going to make a lick of difference in this regard until there's broad enough electoral reform that Congress' corruption truly begins to get addressed, and nothing is going to change a system that benefits the rich and powerful but a groundswell of people from across the political spectrum forcing that change. It is the only way.
We're seeing in Iowa results that would have seemed unthinkable a few months ago. If we're bold, this year we can cross the divide and work together to solve the structural problems that are corroding our political system to the point of collapse. We could be on the cusp of major change. Let's not let the silly pageantry of the presidential election keep us from addressing the root causes of our political displeasure.