The motley crew

Perhaps the most striking thing about last week's Iowa caucuses was that the top two vote-getters on each side are probably unacceptable to the majority of voters in November. Regardless of which permutation resulted, it would be one of the more dismal electoral match-ups in American history.

The apparent winner by a whisker on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton, has been dogged throughout her public life by so many scandals that they are now impossible to itemize, the latest of which ("email-gate") could even lead to a felony indictment before the election (thereby raising all kinds of tricky legal questions were she to win it).

Even if Hillary avoids that fate, most likely by a hyperpartisan Obama administration's squashing of an FBI referral, she remains the most distrusted political figure in American politics, an observation bolstered by that Quinnipiac poll from last August in which "liar" and "dishonest" and "untrustworthy" were far and away the first words that came to respondents' minds when hearing her name.

Hillary's legion of apologists, apart from the dwindling diehards who blame it all, increasingly implausibly, on that "vast right-wing conspiracy," never really deny that she lies, but argue (a) all politicians lie; (b) some (usually unnamed) lie more than she does; and (c) her lying is justified because it keeps the evil Republicans at bay.

Apparently, when you make a pact with the devil in pursuit of political power, it is necessary to pretend she isn't a devil, or at least resembles Beelzebub to a lesser extent than the alternatives.

Her lone rival at this point is, of course, a 74-year-old self-proclaimed socialist, albeit of the milquetoast "social democrat" variety, whose free-stuff wish list would roughly double a national debt that is already dangerously hovering near the size of the gross domestic product. One suspects that not even his most ardent supporters really believe Bernie Sanders can win a general election in a country like America or that his political program bears any resemblance to reality.

Bernie is the spawn of Occupy Wall Street, and like that movement, is propelled less by logic and facts than emotion and ignorance. The likelihood exists that his college-campus devotees have never even heard of, let alone read, Karl Marx or studied socialism as an historical political movement, and thus have no idea where their (and his) ideas came from.

Things on the GOP side, post-Iowa, actually look a bit more promising, only because the reality TV star who isn't really a conservative, or even a Republican, and who has the emotional makeup of a 9-year-old and the knowledge of public policy of a 6-year-old finally got derailed.

The guy who always wins--because he's a "winner," and the rest of us are "losers"--lost.

Trump's appeal is easy to locate--as one observer noted, he represents nothing so much as a giant middle finger stuck up the rear end of the much detested, if seldom defined, "establishment." That political correctness would at some point produce a backlash was clear, that it would come in the form of Trump is unfortunate for both the GOP and the nation--being critical of PC totalitarianism has now become more difficult because of guilt by association with Trump.

The slayer of the know-nothing blowhard, Ted Cruz, is widely, and not entirely inaccurately, portrayed as an inflexible ideologue incapable of working with others, let alone governing effectively from the Oval Office. What Sanders is to Occupy Wall Street, Cruz is to the Tea Party, with a bit of evangelical fire and brimstone thrown in to winning effect in Iowa as well.

Whereas Trump, in his sheer opportunism, has no ideology, Cruz has nothing but.

But being purer than thou is a full-time job that allows for no slip-ups--political virginity once lost, like the other kind, can't be regained, and it is the source of Cruz's appeal for some folks that makes it impossible for others, probably a much larger number, to countenance him.

When being an ideologue is your calling card, you, by definition, can't ever appear to be anything else, and it is Cruz's dogmatism on matters ideological that will likely restrict his appeal to only those who share his inflexible convictions.

Cruz winning Iowa was better for Republicans than Trump winning Iowa, but the better news still was the close third-place finish for Marco Rubio, who has been somewhat erroneously and even mischievously characterized by the media as the "establishment" GOP candidate.

To the contrary, Rubio is the candidate whose mainstream conservative views almost certainly best represent the majority of Republican voters and who, serendipitously, also has the best chance to defeat even an unindicted Hillary in November.

Depending on what happens hereafter, including tomorrow in New Hampshire, the 43,228 votes that Rubio got in Iowa might therefore turn out to be among the most important ever cast, in the sense of potentially saving us from a President Donald Trump or President Hillary Clinton, or simply from forcing a majority of Americans who detest both from having to hold their noses and choose between them nine months from now.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 02/08/2016

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