Iowa's over, and it's on

I was an Edwards bird, myself, or would have been if they let out-of-state eagles vote in Iowa. But, I have no problem with Barack Obama winning. There's much to like about Obama too. I could proudly vote for him in the general. Clinton too, for that matter.

That's the strength of our field: we have a bunch of good candidates. A lot of us are nearly as happy with our third choice as our first. Republicans have no such luck this time out. Most of them can't even seem to find a first choice they like, and those who can seem to loathe all the other candidates--Huckabee's middle-class evangelicals and Rudy's secular Muslim-haters have surprisingly little in common. Their coalition has fractured, and ours is coming together.

And, if being unified and inspired is the goal, it's hard to do better than Barack Obama. If you haven't seen his victory speech, watch it and just try not to feel hopeful and inspired at the end of it:


The man is a tremendously inspiring speaker. His youth (he's 46, young by presidential standards) gives his candidacy an air of sweeping out the thick cobwebs of the Bush years; he gives you something inspiring to vote for, which is a nice contrast to the Republicans, who won in 2004 by scaring the shit out of everybody.

And, apparently, that message had powerful appeal to the tens of thousands of first-time caucus goers; obviously Obama has a rare gift for bringing the young, the cynical and the previously disengaged into the political process. I salute him for it. And, I salute him for knowing in 2002, in real time, that the war was a terrible mistake, and saying so. Neither of his chief rivals can make that claim.

The reasons I wouldn't have voted for him, at least not with Edwards as an alternative? He turned me off a little bit by repeating some old talking points about how we must do something about social security. Look, Barack, we worked hard to get that issue off the table. Let's not raise it again.

Also, at least from what I've read I think both Edwards and Clinton are more likely to push for genuine universal health care than Obama is (although he's better on that issue than any of the Republicans, by an enormous margin).

And as susceptible as I am to inspiration, for me, Obama's "let's all believe in things" message was not as appealing as Edwards's "let's fight the bastards" message. I've spent the last seven years the way most politically engaged sane people have: stewing in impotent rage. I want to fight. I don't want to find common ground with the forces that brought us Bush's America. I want to crush them flat. They can't be dealt with in good faith and they obviously interpret compromise as weakness. Before we can make peace with the Republicans we have to smash the elements in their movement that have been trying for years to smash us, and will keep trying to do so no matter how nice we are. And of the top tier candidates, Edwards alone seems to get that.

Nevertheless, for a long time Obama was my preferred candidate, and not just because he's such an inspiring speaker. No, my reason was actually much more cynical (ironically).

Basically, at the time I thought John McCain would be the Republican nominee, and McCain has always gotten ridiculously positive coverage. (He's frequently described in what are supposed to be objective accounts as a "straight-talker" or a "maverick"--try to think of any other candidate who can get the press to mindlessly parrot his campaign slogans like that.) So, I reasoned, our best shot at victory was to nominate the candidate on our side who the press also seems to like.

Obama seems to have charmed the media into giving him decent coverage at least so far. Which is not true of Clinton or Edwards. I hate that we have a media culture founded on social-climbing high school groupthink, but we do, and we have to deal with that. And, with McCain again looking like at least a minor threat (a lot of the media talking head types are feverishly trying to hype his fourth-place finish behind Sleepy Fred Thompson as a McCain juggernaut, and should he win New Hampshire, I guess it's on), maybe we still have to think about that.

Here's the thing, though. They're going to slime whoever we nominate.

It's pointless to try to nominate a candidate with no baggage. We've tried that. Wasn't that basically the rationale for John Kerry? He was an experienced political veteran and a war hero. Very few people found John Kerry exciting, but we thought he was a safe candidate. But the right manufactured some baggage for him, and the media went right along with it. Remember those purple heart band-aids at the '04 convention? Repulsive, but this is what we have to expect.

And that, I'm afraid, is an argument for Hillary Clinton, probably the strongest argument for her. No one knows more about what it's like to face the right-wing slime machine, and a media willing to mindlessly repeat everything that comes out of it. She's been facing it since 1992. There's nothing new they can say about Hillary, and if they did find something everyone would yawn. "Been there, done that."

Obama is a newer figure on the scene, so people aren't used to hearing things about him in the same way. And, if you look around, you can already see which particular low road they're going to take if Obama is the nominee: double-barrel racism. They're going to package fear of Muslims with fear of blacks.

Jonah Goldberg:

I think it's worth imagining a certain scenario. Imagine the Democrats do rally around Obama. Imagine the media invests as heavily in him as I think we all know they will if he's the nominee -- and then imagine he loses. I seriously think certain segments of American political life will become completely unhinged. I can imagine the fear of this social unraveling actually aiding Obama enormously in 2008.

Gee, what "certain segments" does Jonah think are one electoral defeat away from becoming a bunch of violent savages?

And yet, right-wing blog luminaries like Instapundit and Michelle Malkin link approvingly to Goldberg's startlingly racist prediction. Silly little birds like me thought maybe the main racist card in this deck would be the anti-Muslim one. And, apparently, that's still in the deck too.

From Free Republic:

Is Hussein Obama the weakest Dem for the General election?

By sending forth Hussein Osama out of Iowa, Democrats have unwittingly weakened their general election prospects.

Hussein's exotic mixture of radical liberalism, Kwanzaa Socialism, antipathy towards the unborn, and weakness against his jihadi brethren will all come back to destroy him against almost any Republican opponent, even the snake-grope from Hope. . . .

As defenders of this great Republic, and of the pinnacle of Western civilization that it represents, we should all come together tonight and agree on a common strategy that will keep the White House from becoming a madrassa.

Is that unhinged and brain-dead? Of course it is. And it's precisely the kind of racist smear we're going to hear for the next ten months, if Obama's the nominee. Be prepared. Hating and sliming is basically all they do, and, staring into the pitiless void of political oblivion, they're going to hit whoever we nominate with whatever they have. We need to be ready.