(1) 6:45 am
I’ll keep adding to this post in bits and pieces through the day, time-stamping each installment.
Who is Britney Spears working for? How much did that lady pay Spears to steal Obama‘s thunder?
(Maintained assumption: Edwards would never stoop to this.)
(2) 6:45 am
If you want it down to 2 decimal places, here’s the official tally.
(3) 7:24 am
Yes, it’s a victory for Obama. By the rules of the game, it’s a resounding victory. But I think anyone who writes about the Iowa Cock-ups today has a duty to call attention to the fact that a) Iowa voters are hardly representative of the rest of the country, and b) by the rules of the Iowa Cock-ups delegate count percentages may have no correlation with percentage of votes “cast” (especially first round votes).
The reason why I refer to them as the Cock-ups is not because of the quirky rules. I guess that’s part and parcel of the colorful fabric of what we are pleased to think of as the great democracy on this planet. What makes what happened last night a cock-up is what’s happening now, in the media, after the results are in.
Pundit pronouncements about the meaning and relevance of the results, unfortunately, do have an element of self-fulfilling prophecy. Apart from that, they are pure unadulterated hogwash, and make no sense whatsoever in terms of their logic or reasonableness.
(4) 9:58 am
I understand the poetic justice gods have decreed that Rudee‘s poll numbers will fall in the next 2 weeks to 9-11 levels. That is to say, they will bounce back and forth between 9% and 11%.
(5) 10:17 am
I don’t normally cite assholes, but I have been known to make exceptions from time to time. In that spirit, here‘s John Podhoretz, an asshole of the first water. I ask only that you don’t increase his page views by actually clicking on the link.
On MSNBC, Rudy Giuliani is making a very smiley, happy showing of himself. The result in Iowa could not have been better for Giuliani tactically. Romney has been injured. Huckabee won, but did not apparently win by a huge margin, and there won’t be many other states where evangelicals make up fully three-fifths of the primary electorate. And John McCain did not, it seems, come in third with a surprising showing, but fourth with a very modest showing. If McCain beats Romney in New Hampshire, Romney will have a difficult time going on — but McCain clearly hasn’t yet turned the corner and brought conservative Republicans back in his corner. And Fred Thompson’s third-place showing wasn’t impressive enough to kick his campaign back to life.
Very good, John. You can sit down now. The only trouble with his analysis is that the view is the same from every Republican candidate’s camp. Every single candidate-from-hell is looking around at all the others and saying: “None of these mothers still has a hope in hell of winning the nomination.” And, of course, they are all right. That’s the absurd paradox of this year’s Republican nomination battle. Nobody can win, even though somebody presumably will, somehow, eventually.
What would actually make most sense, though, is for the Republicans to conserve their money for the next election cycle by just giving up and conceding this one. It would have the advantage of postponing a possible disintegration of their party too. (I don’t know why I just give away all my best ideas to them for free.)