Iowa Madness

Okay, I'm in a diner in Des Moines this morning with my nine-year-old son, who I have brought along for my tour d'Iowa while he's on winter break. (Dear Mr. Newhouse, I paid for his ticket myself and will deduct his meals.)

We're sitting there and around a corner comes a Fox News crew fixing to interview me about the caucuses. I have a laugh with the correspondent, Molly Henenberg, because we covered the White House together. She moves on to the next table, but it, alas, is a French TV crew.

In other words, it's the usual chaotic, media-soaked, ad-saturated quadrennial frenzy except this time no one knows who's gonna win on either side. I'd bet on Obama and Romney if I had to wager right now, but who knows?

A few impressions from driving around to the events:

Biden's Big Crowd. Saw Joe Biden in Iowa on Monday. Huge crowd at the library in Ames, maybe 400 as best I could tell although I got there late and was jammed into a hallway. Is it possible the loquacious senior senator from Delaware can actually put something together more than 20 years after he dropped out of the 1988 presidential race for ssweiping a few lines from a little remembered British Labor candidate, Neil Kinnock? There is a scenario, albeit as likely as Dow 36,000. Biden comes in a respectable fourth in Iowa while a trounced Hillary comes in third. She's seen as toast; he becomes the candidate of experience against Edwards and Obama. Something happens overseas to make said experience more valuable. I can't see it happening but it's in the realm of the remotely possible.

Obama. Saw him address a big crowd at the Boone fairgrounds yesterday. Forty minutes into his talk, my nine year old says to me: "He's not really saying anything." Granted, my boy has been brainwashed by his mother who, as I've noted frequently works for Hillary. So he's predisposed to eye rolling and yawns at those who don't have Clinton in their name. Still, he might have been on to something. Hope feels a little thin after awhile. But Obama gives a good talk and I kept my eye focused on one old codger in the audience who had raised his hand when Obama asked who was undecided. Maybe the guy was a ringer, but he seemed pretty won over by the time the show ended. (I didn't get a chance to tallk to him and even if I did, he could change his mind again.) My point being that I think Obama wears well. That said, all the buzz among reporters is about Edwards being on the march. I fear an Edwards-Romney contest which would remind me of that defuct TV show, The Swan, where contestants undergo massive plastic surgery to transform themselves from ugly ducklings to....well, you get the idea. Both Edwards and Romney are preternaturally handsome and youthful. Both have a certain ideological, uh, flexibility. Still, for Portfolio, it's hard to imagine a better economic showdown than the Bain founder versus the trial lawyer.

Speaking of Romney, i saw him speak last night in Ames. He made a hard-core evangelical play, bringing around Jay Sekulow, who represents evangelical groups in lots of Supreme Court cases and is a regular on the 700 club. He also had Rev. Lou Sheldon of the wonderfully named Traditional Values Coalition. These guys are hard core, and for Romney to bring them out is a reminder of how much the traditional evangelical establishment has failed to back Huckabee even though you'd think he'd be one of them. I guess his not wanting to cut children's health funding and saying nice things about the Clintons puts him out of bounds. I was driving to the Ames event listening to a local talk show host rant about "evangelical lefties" like Huckabee who are "solid" on guns and abortion but too lib-er-al on everything else. This is a different year.

Speaking of which, I made it to the Huck & Chuck event last night where Gov. Mike was joined on stage by martial arts expert and Total Gym pitchman Chuck Norris who not only looked mah-vel-ous but did a pretty good pitch for Huckabee in an everyman kind of way. In one of the odder moments, he sold Huckabee's "fair tax"--the replacement of the income tax by a massive sales tax--as progressive because right now Arab sheiks come here and buy yachts and don't have to pay any tax. Actually, they at least pay the sales tax but more importantly, any system of taxation based on the purchase of goods rather than income is bound to be regressive even if you exempt food and other staples. The poor spend all of their income and these days so does the middle class. Only the rich could really escape taxation on a significant portion of their income. But Norris did a good job selling Huckanomics and the crowd and the rest of Iowa seems to be buying it.