Goings-on in Iowa
Filed under: US Elections
Democratic doings in Iowa last night.
The Iowa Caucus failed to correctly predict the eventual candidates in three of the last seven presidential elections: 1992 (it said Bush-Harkin, actually Bush-Clinton), 1988 (it said Dole-Gephardt, actually Bush-Dukakis) and 1980 (it said Bush-Carter, actually Reagan-Carter). That's a failure rate of nearly 43%.
No Republican candidate has received a majority of the Caucus vote during the past 25 years, and this tradition continued in 2008. Last night, 66% of Republican Caucus-goers voted against the winner, Mike Huckabee. On the Democrat side, three candidates have won a majority of the Caucus vote during that period (Gore, Harkin and Carter).
Only twice, however, in the past 25 years has a Democrat gone on to win the White House (never once in the past quarter century has a Democrat been elected with a majority of the popular vote, whilst Republicans have achieved that every single time they've won, except Dubya in 2000), and none of the three Democrat majority-getters from Iowa managed to actually take the oath of office. That may be good news for Barack Obama, because 62% of Democrat Caucus-goers voted against him last night when he won their contest. But the only Democrat elected president in the past 25 years was the governor of a state -- as were all the Republicans who were elected president other than the one who was vice president. Obama is neither. An idiotic op-ed in the Washington Post stated: "People who complain that Barack Obama lacks experience must be unaware of his legislative achievements." Too right they are, because the office of POTUS is an EXECUTIVE position, not a legislative one. Every single POTUS elected in the past 25 years has had elected executive experience before taking office. Obama lacks it. Huckabee has it -- so maybe choosing him isn't as crazy as some people might like to suggest.
Hillary Clinton. Third place. Ouch. Then again, her hubby came in fourth in 1992 (behind Paul Tsogas!). So maybe it's not the end of the world. Quite. On the other hand, she has no elected executive experience either.
Also bad news for labor unions. Double ouch.
Obama's win is rather inconvenient for all those who accuse America of being a racist nation intolerant of diverse viewpoints. Iowa is lily-white, Obama handily whipped his lily-white opponents. Triple ouch.
Speaking of the America-haters, in a virtually insane piece of gibberish the New York Times editorial board said that Iowa shouldn't have so much importance in American elections and the way they pick the candidates isn't very democratic. Yeah, yeah -- only every haughty, elitist, ideologically- motivated word they wrote is totally wrong: (1) It doesn't have that much influence, as seen in the above-mentioned failure rate. (2) The board (or is that bored) then went on to put the Iowa results on the front page of their paper, giving them even more importance. Is that insane or what? (3) Is telling a state how it can/should pick the president really in the spirit of democracy? Is trying to homogenize an electoral process? Is the Times actually worried that the process is too democratic, and allow candidates they don't like to rise to power? Do the so-called "Americans" who edit the Times believe at all in the principle of federalism and freedom of choice? (4) See why these dead-tree psychopaths going extinct, dear reader?
But the most pathetic thing of all was Democrat moonbat-in-chief Howard Dean commenting on CNN. He said Huckabee's win proves the Republicans are in disarray since he came out of nowhere and is only the governor of a small unimportant state. Then Wolf Blitzer reminded him of Bill Clinton. Dean turned beet red and muttered like an imbecile.
Nuff said.
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