[NYTr] Iowa: Two Earthquakes

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Ed Pearl

[Brooks' solid, older Republican values lend weight and interest
to many of his insights herein - about the horse-race, that is, if not
the controlling forces within the parties.  Knight is brilliant, as
usual. Ed]

The New York Times - Jan 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/opinion/04brooks.html

The Two Earthquakes

By DAVID BROOKS
Ottumwa, Iowa

I've been through election nights that brought a political earthquake
to the country. I've never been through an election night that brought
two.

Barack Obama has won the Iowa caucuses. You'd have to have a heart of
stone not to feel moved by this. An African-American man wins a closely
fought campaign in a pivotal state. He beats two strong opponents,
including the mighty Clinton machine. He does it in a system that
favors rural voters. He does it by getting young voters to come out to
the caucuses.

This is a huge moment. It's one of those times when a movement that
seemed ethereal and idealistic became a reality and took on political
substance.

Iowa won't settle the race, but the rest of the primary season is going
to be colored by the glow of this result. Whatever their political
affiliations, Americans are going to feel good about the Obama victory,
which is a story of youth, possibility and unity through diversity - the
primordial themes of the American experience.

And Americans are not going to want to see this stopped. When an
African-American man is leading a juggernaut to the White House, do you
want to be the one to stand up and say No?

Obama has achieved something remarkable. At first blush, his speeches
are abstract, secular sermons of personal uplift - filled with
disquisitions on the nature of hope and the contours of change.

He talks about erasing old categories like red and blue (and implicitly,
black and white) and replacing them with new categories, of which the
most important are new and old. He seems at first more preoccupied with
changing thinking than changing legislation.

Yet over the course of his speeches and over the course of this
campaign, he has persuaded many Iowans that there is substance here as
well. He built a great organization and produced a tangible victory.

He's made Hillary Clinton, with her wonkish, pragmatic approach to
politics, seem uninspired. He's made John Edwards, with his angry cries
that "corporate greed is killing your children's future," seem
old-fashioned. Edwards's political career is probably over.

Obama is changing the tone of American liberalism, and maybe American
politics, too.

On the Republican side, my message is: Be not afraid. Some people are
going to tell you that Mike Huckabee's victory last night in Iowa
represents a triumph for the creationist crusaders. Wrong.

Huckabee won because he tapped into realities that other Republicans
have been slow to recognize. First, evangelicals have changed. Huckabee
is the first ironic evangelical on the national stage. He's funny,
campy (see his Chuck Norris fixation) and he's not at war with modern
culture.

Second, Huckabee understands much better than Mitt Romney that we have a
crisis of authority in this country. People have lost faith in their 
leaders' ability to respond to problems. While Romney embodies the
leadership class, Huckabee went after it. He criticized Wall Street and
K Street. Most importantly, he sensed that conservatives do not believe
their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for
Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had
at him, and their diminished power is now exposed.

Third, Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived.
Democrats talk about wages. But real middle-class families have more to
fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. A person's
lifetime prospects will be threatened more by single parenting than by
outsourcing. Huckabee understands that economic well-being is fused
with social and moral well-being, and he talks about the
inter-relationship in a way no other candidate has.

In that sense, Huckabee's victory is not a step into the past. It opens
up the way for a new coalition.

A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of
economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves
capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either.
Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people
making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth
defending.

Will Huckabee move on and lead this new conservatism? Highly doubtful.
The past few weeks have exposed his serious flaws as a presidential
candidate. His foreign policy knowledge is minimal. His lapses into
amateurishness simply won't fly in a national campaign.

So the race will move on to New Hampshire. Mitt Romney is now grievously
wounded. Romney represents what's left of Republicanism 1.0. Huckabee
and McCain represent half-formed iterations of Republicanism 2.0. My
guess is Republicans will now swing behind McCain in order to stop Mike.

Huckabee probably won't be the nominee, but starting last night in
Iowa, an evangelical began the Republican Reformation.