COMMENTARY

BRUMMETT ONLINE: Dissecting Iowa

A social media pal crystallized caucus night in Iowa precisely, calling it better for Republicans than Democrats.

Republicans emerge from Iowa with a viable establishment alternative and solid general-election prospect in Marco Rubio.

The whip-smart boy wonder is now fully in the game with the two blustery front-runners of high negatives, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

Democrats limp from Iowa with an inevitable nominee in Hillary Clinton who is looking like a tired ’90s relic, relying on old folks in a young person’s world and having a devil of a time with a shouting old socialist who, at the very best, might carry a half-dozen states in a general election.

First to the happier Republicans:

Had Trump won, he might have been on his tragic way, since he leads in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Yet more than half the country rejects the notion of such a blowhard, such an offender of sensibilities, as president.

The Cruz victory in Iowa means much less than a Trump victory would have. The Cruz win was but a right-wing church thing, which is what an Iowa Republican caucus has become.

Thus the Cruz victory was no more broadly significant than Mike Huckabee’s in Iowa in 2008 and Rick Santorum’s in 2012.

The real winner was Rubio, coming up on the outside with a late-developing campaign based in Iowa’s excuse for population centers where there are a lot of conventional professional and suburban Republicans.

Some observers criticized Rubio’s Iowa campaign, which was directed by veteran Arkansas political operative Clint Reed, for waiting so late and focusing so narrowly. But it was smart. He didn’t need to waste time and money on an all-in statewide campaign that was going to be won by either the evangelicals for Cruz or by Trump’s superficial celebrity.

The best Rubio could ever hope was third, and he could get there almost by default. So the test became whether his third would be a weak and distant one that would deflate his candidacy or a strong and surging one that would put him on a cloud bound for New Hampshire. It was a strong surging third. Heck, he nearly beat Trump for second.

I take credit for predicting the Rubio surge, but I admit I had it all wrong. I thought he’d take votes from Cruz.

Instead Rubio took them from Trump, who had been strutting around Iowa with Jerry Falwell Jr. and trying to convince Iowa’s religious right that he was just what the Lord ordered for America. Rubio took a great many of those votes by putting his own conservative religion out there on his sleeve where the evangelicals demand that their favored politicians keep it.

MSNBC analyst Chris Matthews said something very smart Monday night. It was that Rubio has the ability to be different things to different people.

Some evangelicals see him as nearly a holy-roller equivalent of Cruz. Some more general arch-conservatives see him as a Tom Cotton-type warrior. But some see him as a pleasant near-moderate, since everything is relative.

Trump could make nearly anyone seem pleasant, and Cruz could make nearly anyone seem moderate.

Here’s what’s going to be fun: the Arkansas Republican presidential primary March 1.

Now that Mike Huckabee has mercifully exited, our local contest of Rubio versus Cruz versus Trump will be positively scintillating.

I’m liking Rubio. Two of the most reactionary right-wingers in the Legislature, Bart Hester of Cave Springs and David Meeks of Conway, are in his camp. If he can get establishment Republicans plus a share of the screwballs — well, that’s the ticket to victory in regressed Arkansas these days.

Now to the sadder Democrats:

Hillary called it a win for her. It was a tie.

The difference in statewide delegate-equivalencies, a horrid Democratic caucus calculation, was, with 99 percent of the vote counted, a mere four in approximately 1,400. Hillary’s tiny advantage was aided slightly, though not singularly provided, by faring better than Sanders in a few coin tosses prescribed by rules to decide delegates to county conventions.

Those occurred in precincts where, as I understand, there was either a dead heat or something called “an orphan delegate” because of some discrepancy between caucus attendance and the sum of candidate votes.

Hillary is an irony: She seriously contends to make history as the first woman president and is smart and knowledgeable and tough, but she seems to excite hardly anyone. She starts to remind vaguely of Al Gore and Hubert Humphrey, not her husband or Barack Obama.

Now she must immediately endure, most likely, a pretty substantial drubbing in New Hampshire before she can get south to black votes and back in to some victories.

I’ve long been on record predicting Clinton versus Rubio and calling Rubio the candidate Hillary most fears. Iowa gave that wavering prediction a good night.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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