But Wait! The Election is Just Getting Started...
WHEN I TURN IN TONIGHT AND SAY MY PRAYERS, along with asking for a break for Britney, I'll beseech the heavens to make the outcome of Tuesday's New Hampshire primary a surprise. Not that I have a thing against the charismatic Democratic Illinois Senator Barack Obama or the Republican with the man-of-the-cloth manner, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. But I do resent the media's penchant for reacting as though Iowa's results are a fait accompli for the rest of the race, particularly for the Dems. Even the hard-to-impress Maureen Dowd of The New York Times has joined the Obama bandwagon, waxing romantically on Sunday about his caucus win: "The Obama revolution arrived not on little cat feet in the Iowa snow but like a balmy promise, an effortlessly leaping lion hungry for something different, propelled by a visceral desire among Americans to feel American again." Little cat feet? Balmy promise? A hungry leaping lion? Maureen, that's downright mawkish for you.
Despite Dowd's labeling Obama's win a "revolution," if you read the same paper the previous day you would have been reminded that only one previous winner of the Iowa caucuses has ever gone on to win the presidency -- George Bush in 2000. And the Times' sister paper, the International Herald Tribune pointedly asks voters and the media for perspective. "Watching the campaign in cold, snowy and mostly empty Iowa, we were hoping...that this year's Iowa-New Hampshire rush to judgment will be the last...Keeping this race alive so significant numbers of Americans in more populated states can participate would begin to make up for the ludicrous spectacle of the past year, which enriched the television networks and the political consultants (some $300 million already spent) far more than it enriched the political dialogue. We hope both parties will wake up and end the undemocratic system in which the choice of a new president rests far too heavily on nonbinding votes in January by voters who don't necessarily represent the rest of the country." Crabby could not have said it better.
A year into this premature ejacu-lection, many voters still don't know what's inside the suit known as Mitt Romney; they yearn to see the robotic Hillary spill some crocodile tears, a la Oprah, as proof that she really is human; they want time to figure out if Huckabee is Bush-lite in a Barber Quintet's outfit; they wait to see if the real McCain or the panderer will please stand up. On another note, I think it's too bad for us all that Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich and Texas Republican Ron Paul weren't allowed to debate on Fox Sunday night. Whoever said the revolution will not be televised was right. When it happens, we'll all be watching reruns of The Simpsons.
Posted January 7, 2008
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