I’ll have more tomorrow after a good night’s sleep, and I may well revise and extend this then, but I won’t let a lack of cognitive consciousness stop me from putting out a few overtired thoughts.
First, on the Democratic side, John Edwards is DONE!!! with a capital E and three exclamation points. Yeah, he took second to Barack Obama, but he needed to both get much closer than 8 percentage points (in delegate-equivalents; the Dems have goofy rules that don’t let vote totals get out) to the lead and more than a half a percentage point ahead of Hillary Clinton. Iowa was his make-or-break state, and he didn’t quite make.
Speaking of Clinton, she is now on life support. I won’t say that race is over, if only because there is enough of the Clinton Slime Machine for one more slime, but if she can’t capture New Hampshire, we will have Dem nominee Barack Obama long before Super-Duper Tuesday, with potentially-frightening consequences for the Republican process.
On the Republican side, almost everybody, including the temporary-cheering section in the media, grossly underestimated the Huck-A-Boom. Mike Huckabee has survived a very heavy round of Hack-A-Huck, mainly by tapping into both the logical conclusion of “compassionate ‘conservatism'” (namely, using the power and full weight of government to force a particular set of values that at best bear a passing semblance to conservatism) and the evangelical factor to destroy the well-(and self-)financed person that exlemplified the “mere” extension of “compassionate ‘conservatism'” and the rest of the field. The problem is the next state, New Hampshire, isn’t exactly evangelical-friendly. However, he’s game to try.
Destroyed best describes Mitt Romney. In the span of 6 weeks, he went from the prohibitive favorite to a 9-point loser despite outspending the competition and flopping from view to view to fit the perceived message, and he’s headed to another state where he’s in unexpected serious trouble. He’s uncomfortably stuck in the middle of the road with the loser toe tag on.
The view on Fred Thompson is very mixed. As I type, he’s holding onto a 0.26-point lead for third with 7% of the precincts left to report. The good news is his original competition in his next competitive state, Romney in South Carolina, is dead in the water, listing, settling, and ablaze, and Thompson is, if barely, the last broad-spectrum conservative relatively unscathed. The bad is New Hampshire lies between the two, and South Carolina is arguably very evangelical-friendly (remember, John McCain’s campaign died there in 2000 immediately after he pissed off the evangelicals).
John McCain lives on to fight another day. Even if he doesn’t come back to take 3rd, he exceeded expectations, which combined with Romney’s fall, will be more than enough to give him New Hampshire again. However, the field is too crowded, and he’s not enough of a media darling to take that and do what he didn’t do in 2000.
Ron Paul is the third surprise. He has the ability to be a very nasty spoiler (with the emphasis on nasty), though beyond helping to finish off Romney in New Hampshire because of his Libertarian background, I do not know who else he will spoil, mainly because there is still barely a Democratic race.
Perhaps the night’s biggest Republican winner is also the night’s second-biggest Republican loser. Despite getting only 3%, Rudy Giuliani has to be happier than a pig in slop over the devastation of Romney. While Huckabee could easily get 2 of the 3 early states that Romney had hoped to sweep, Huckabee’s base is far more dissimilar to Giuliani’s than Romney’s is. That leaves the Giuliani strategy of using the large, socially-liberal states to rack up the delegates pretty much unassaultable directly.
So, what now? To cleanly paraphrase Marcellus Wallace (which means I lose the most-colorful half of the language), let me tell you what now. Thompson has to get a few hard-cases to go to work on the Huck in South Carolina. You hear me talking, Huckleberry boy? We ain’t through with you by a damn sight. We’re gonna get medevial.
