On November 9, 1965, a young boy was walking down the street in Brooklyn with a stick in his hand. At exactly 5:27, he took the stick and struck a utility pole. When he did so, all of the lights on the street went out. The terrified boy dropped the stick and started running home. As he ran, he noticed all of the lights were out for the entire five block trip home. When he got home, his parents were listening to the radio. The news reader said that power was out in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Ontario, Canada!
Finally, after four hours of agony, the guilt-stricken child tearfully confessed to his parents that he was the cause of the power outage because he hit a light pole with a stick. Holding back laughter, his parents hugged him and assured him that it was a coincidence that the lights went out when he hit the pole. The culprit was actually a relay at Niagara's Sir Adam Beck station in Ontario that was set too low. A small power surge in Lewiston, NY tripped the relay, which began a domino effect tripping relays at power plants all along the Eastern Seaboard.
There's something oddly endearing about a little boy thinking he could make parts of eight states lose power with a stick. That kind of thinking is not so endearing, however, when it comes from adults with a highly exaggerated sense of their own power and importance.
In the aftermath of Thursday's Iowa Caucus victories by Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama, my inbox was full of press releases from groups claiming their efforts were responsible for the poor showing by Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. About half of these claims were made by pro-life groups who felt they were single-handedly responsible for Guiliani's defeat in Iowa.
For example, here's a statement issued by Randall Terry, former head of Operation Rescue and currently head of a group called The Society for Truth and Justice. The statement was titled "Giuliani Trounced Because of Abortion: New Hampshire, Florida Next."
America's Mayor is being sent back to City Hall because of his support of abortion. Our mission is to speed up that process by continuing to expose and confront him in New Hampshire this weekend, then Florida for the rest of the month. We will be dogging Rudy in Florida next, until his campaign is a smoldering ruin and a warning to any other pro-choice Republicans: Stay out, or face the same end.
Ummm... folks, did you happen to notice that for all practical purposes, Rudy did not run in Iowa? His strategy from the beginning has been to bypass Iowa and New Hampshire and concentrate on the Super Tuesday states. Giuliani is counting on garnering all of the delegates he needs to secure the Republican nomination from the later primaries. That strategy may come back to haunt him as momentum builds for Huckabee and perhaps Romney or McCain from the early wins and he is all but absent from the political news for these next few weeks.
Whether or not Giuliani's early primary strategy is wise or not, the fact is he all but conceded Iowa from the get-go, so the groups claiming they brought down Giuliani in Iowa is laughable. Evangelical groups should be wary of claiming credit for the "defeat" of a candidate in a state he didn't really run in. It makes us look as silly as the boy with the stick thinking he caused a blackout, or a rooster who thinks the sun came up because he crowed!
Giuliani's poor showing in Iowa wasn't the only result that would-be Davids with their self-imagined slingshots were eager to take credit for. Mitt Romney finished nearly ten points behind Huckabee, and Peter LaBarbera of the Republicans for Family Values was crowing in a press release he issued on Friday:
There is a story the media missed in its reporting of Mitt Romney's humiliating loss in Iowa to the comparatively vastly under-funded Mike Huckabee: how a dogged "truth campaign" by pro- family advocates -- mostly from Romney's own state of Massachusetts -- to educate social conservatives on his liberal record on abortion and homosexuality helped seal his defeat.
Well, at least Romney actively campaigned in Iowa, but I firmly believe Romney sunk his own battleship in Iowa with negative campaigning and his obvious lack of sincerity and integrity. In short, Mitt Romney lost to Huckabee because despite all of the money spent by Romney, when Iowa Republicans weighed the two candidates, they found Romney wanting. Mr. LaBarbera and his peers may have helped expose some of the Romney flaws, but the Romney loss in Iowa was a do-it-yourself proposition. (And for what it is worth, Mr. LaBarbera, what exactly does "comparatively vastly" mean???)
Thursday's biggest losers, in my opinion, are Romney and Clinton. Romney poured over 7 million dollars into Iowa and he hinged his campaign on a big win in Iowa right out of the block. The resounding victory by Huckabee - who spent significantly less than 1 million dollars in Iowa - is a huge blow and an embarrassment to the former Massachusetts governor. Likewise, Hillary Clinton viewed Iowa as the first stop of her coronation tour. She and Bill both predicted she would win in Iowa by "a pretty good margin" as late as November. In mid-December, Clinton issued orders that no one on her staff was to predict a win in Iowa anymore. Pundits interpreted that move as part of the "expectations" game that campaigns play, but it soon became apparent that the Clinton camp no longer believed they could win in Iowa. On December 21, Politico.com quoted Clinton staffers as saying she could survive a second-place finish in Iowa and that the state was not do-or-die for her. They never imagined she would actually finish third.
Now, New Hampshire is indeed a do-or-die state for the Clintons. John Edwards is already saying that her poor showing in Iowa may have rendered her effectively out of the race for the White House. (Read the story from CNN here) Already the Iowa results have ended two long-shot candidacies - that of Chris Dodd and Joe Biden.
I still maintain that voters this year are looking for a candidate who is genuine and one who can effectively lift the country out of the partisan Red State-Blue State acrimony that has characterized the last decade in American politics. Iowa voters seemed to verify this. It will be very interesting to see if this trend - and the momentum presently enjoyed by Obama and Huckabee - carries over into New Hampshire this coming Tuesday.
For better or worse, the game is on now and we're in for a lot of rhetoric and politics between now and the first Tuesday in November, when we will select the 44th President of the United States.
Related:
The Electorate Is On To Something
Ich bin Ein Mormon
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