What I love about the Iowa outcome

My neighbor, a politically savvy guy, called me on Thursday night when he saw the Iowa results and his reactions was priceless:

“Oh my God, a preacher and a black man just won the Iowa Caucus!”

Indeed. When you think about it, that is pretty remarkable in and of itself but I think it also says a lot about where each Party is right now. First, I gotta say I take no small measure of pride in the modern Democratic Party for making a black man its front-runner. That is a long way from the dark days when the Southern Democratic wing created and then perpetuated the dreadful Jim Crow laws. So even if Obama fails to capture the nomination, his win in Iowa is a watershed event in the history of the Party. As Molly Ivins would say, good on us. For the GOP, however, things get a might bit more complicated with Mike Huckabee’s win.

For the Republican evangelical faction, Huck is their kind of guy, a true Bible-thumper of the first order. At the same time, Huckabee’s populist economic rhetoric is stuff of nightmares for the money people in the GOP, especially coming from a hillbilly Baptist preacher. The Club for Growth and the Heritage Foundation types are going to go after Huckabee in New Hampshire with both guns blazing. And herein lies Huckabee’s great flaw as the GOP standardbearer; he exacerbates the great rift in the Republican Party between the social conservative and economic conservative factions.

It is no secret that the Bible-thumpers think the Wall Street crowd is a bunch of snobs and elitists. Conversely, that pro-business wing views the social conservatives as gaggle of rubes and goobers from the sticks. But they forged an uneasy alliance in the modern GOP, one that promised mutual benefit but really, only the pro-business agenda was served. Abortion, pornography, and gambling are still legal but taxes are lower, regulation is a joke, etc. The social cons know they are getting the shaft in this marriage in convenience but there is damn little they can do about it. They have no place else to go. Then along comes Huck, leading the charge of pissed-off, disaffected, and otherwise disappointed values voters, trying the wrest the party from the Brookes Brothers crowd. And like the Huckabee campaign in Iowa, what the Christian conservatives lack for money they can make up for in numbers. The Wall Street wing sees the writing on the wall and they are scared to death. A populist in the White House means an end to their gravy train. They have no choice but the try and destroy Huckabee in New Hampshire because if he makes it to South Carolina and Florida, he may well go all the way.

So the Democrats are trying to find their leader and, in the process, maybe heal some old wounds while the Republicans are facing the prospect of a bloody internecine war and perhaps even schism. Not bad at all…