For once a presidential contest turns out to be morality play: The candidate
who stuck by his principles won.
And he did it on a bare budget. Mike Huckabee was outspent in Iowa (as he
says over and over) 20-to-1. His last-minute decision to pull a TV spot
bashing Mitt Romney cost his campaign something like $150,000 - which is how
much it had invested in the ad campaign.
That's a big hit when you're a Republican candidate for president not named
Mitt Romney. But the Huck decided to stick to the high road. His decision
may have come late, it may have been clumsy and costly, but it was the right
one. He outpolled his wealthier, smoother, harder-hitting opponent by a
decisive 35 to 24 percent while turning the other cheek.
If this had been a movie, the ending election night would have been too
sappy to be credible. But that's what it happened: a Frank Capra screenplay
turned real. Hey, what a country. Hey, what a state Iowa must be.
Mike Huckabee's show of character didn't seem to hurt him at all. It may
even have helped. Any move that upsets a cynical old pro and brass-knuckles
fighter like Ed Rollins, his campaign manager, can't be all bad. Good for
him. He deserved to win on the strength of that one decision alone.
Sacrifice is the seal of principle.
The big winner in Iowa last Thursday was Barack Obama. Why not? Americans
love a presidential candidate who's brand new even though we may not be sure
what he stands for except novelty.
As for not knowing exactly where such a candidate stands on a multitude of
issues, or what kind of chief executive he'd make, Americans may not really
care, bless our hearts. If a candidate's politics are vacuous, then maybe he
can unite all of us around that vacuum.
Hey, don't laugh. Didn't they say the same thing about Eisenhower before he
was nominated and elected in 1952? Who knew how Ike stood on a multitude of
hotly contested issues? ? (Not even after he'd been in office for eight
years.) And yet he proved one of our most successful presidents.
Of course, unlike this junior senator from Illinois, the general did have
some executive experience - as the German high command discovered after June
6, 1944. When he became commander-in-chief, it wasn't as if he were a buck
private.
But none of that detracts from the romance of Barack Obama's story. The
still racially fixated couldn't get over the results from Iowa Thursday
night. Des Moines and Keokuk aren't Atlanta and New Orleans, you know. How
much of Iowa's population is black - 2 or 3 percent? Yet a black man running
for president stomps the competition. Continued... |