Iowa: It’s Winner-Tastic!

Raging Moderate by: Will Durst

The great thing about the Iowa caucuses is even after it’s over, nobody knows exactly what happened. It’s best described as musical chairs without the music. And no chairs. On the Democratic side, people don’t really vote. They attend, then move off into designated candidate corners, but if not enough people hang in your corner, you have to go somewhere else. So the campaign staff that corners the market on breath mints and deodorant could hold a huge advantage. Hey, there’s worse ways to choose a candidate than by picking the one with the best smelling followers. People still talk about how great Hubert Humphrey’s staffers smelled. Like winners.

That’s another great thing about the Iowa caucuses -- everybody is a winner. The whole damn state is littered with the detritus of winners. Iowa is winner-tastic. Obviously, Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee are winners because… well, they won. And that’s what winners do: they win. But you’d also have to say that John Edwards and Mitt Romney are winners too, because even though they came in second, they called themselves winners, and as big time national politicos, you got to assume they know what they’re talking about. Hillary Clinton is apparently a winner, because in her speech, after coming in third, she never gave the slightest impression she hadn’t won, so maybe she knows something the rest of us don’t, which is another characteristic trait of winners.

Fred Thompson won because he came in third after canvassing the state with the energy of a three-legged tortoise on reds. John McCain won because he spent no time in Iowa at all and still came in fourth. Which, in some books, makes him a double winner. Ron Paul is a big winner coming in a strong fifth, if there is such a thing, when most experts didn’t even expect him to be able to find Iowa on a map. Rudy Giuliani, the Mayor of 9/11, won because he spent no money in Iowa, which can now be used to frighten people in states with more foreigners. Bill Richardson wasn’t really trying to win anyhow, and he didn’t, so he’s a winner. Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd may be the biggest winners because they don’t have to do this anymore. Duncan Hunter is what you call a winner in reverse, since he polled just 500 votes. Which is only 500 votes more than you or I got, and we weren’t even running. Which certainly makes us winners.

The pundits win because they got a lot to talk about. And because of the writers’ strike, people might actually pay attention. The caucus-goers win because their electoral muscles have been exercised. Young people are winners for having participated in unprecedented numbers. Britney Spears wins since people stopped paying attention to her. Hope wins. Change wins. Evangelicals win. Chuck Norris wins. African-Americans win. The country wins. Lot of winners here. Not going to be the case in New Hampshire next week. Going to be a lot of losers there. But here in the Hawkeye State, the biggest winners of all may be the residents of the Great State of Iowa themselves, not just because everybody has already left them to themselves, but because as soon as they did, the temperature rose about 30 degrees.