Mitt Romney did not win the Iowa Republican caucuses by much, just a few delegate votes. But he didn’t lose them, either. He remains the front-runner and the best hope for a credible GOP candidate to challenge Barack Obama in November. That’s the good news out of Iowa.
Utah’s other favorite son, Jon Huntsman, the other best hope for GOP realists, barely registered a blip in Iowa, but that was expected. He did not campaign there, having placed all his eggs in New Hampshire’s basket.
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The other good news is that one of the fringe candidates, Michele Bachmann, has dropped out of the race following her poor showing in Iowa. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Rick Santorum, who surged in Iowa and came within a few delegate votes of Romney.
Santorum is now the flavor of the month in the anyone-but-Mitt camp of the evangelical right. We believe, however, that his surge will be short-lived. His moment in the sun will focus public attention on his extreme social positions and voting record in the U.S. Senate, which caused Pennsylvanians to punch his ticket home in 2006. He is likely to wither under this scrutiny.
Newt Gingrich did not fare well in Iowa, we hope because voters realize how dangerous and despicable he really is.
The other winner in Iowa, Ron Paul, is an interesting phenom. He apparently is benefiting from young, disenchanted voters who embrace his libertarian philosophy. Like Obama before him, he is a beneficiary of the Internet, which spreads his message to plugged-in, younger voters. He could be undone by some of the racist rhetoric with which he has been associated in his newsletter, but it is much more difficult to predict how his role in the campaign may play out.
While many Americans may identify with Paul’s isolationist foreign policy, his exotic proposals to slash the federal budget by $1 trillion in his first year in office, cripple the Federal Reserve and promote alternative currencies, among others, should put moderate voters off.
Which brings us back to Mitt Romney. The search within the GOP for a fire-breathing evangelical or an austerity extremist who would burn the country down along with the federal budget may play to elements of the party’s faithful, but it will not produce a candidate who can challenge Obama in the minds of the larger electorate. Romney, or Huntsman, by contrast, both could.
One other note on Iowa. Attack ads financed by super pacs and other unaccountable groups played a large role late. This does not bode well for the nation’s politics.
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