One week before the Iowa Caucuses, one poll showed Biden ahead, another showed Sanders ahead, and a third showed the race to be a dead heat. At that point, forty percent of Iowans said they were still undecided about their final choice. What do these Iowan prima donnas want? A third or fourth or fifth encounter with a candidate at a coffee shop so they can make up their minds? They have had since last summer to look these candidates over: to evaluate their programs and savor their characters. The main influence of a Bloomberg candidacy, which is already, by one poll, at double digits, may be to rid us of the influence of the “ethanol” state on national politics. Other candidates have already caught that message in that they were scheduled to spend less time in Iowa than in past presidential years because they are aware that Nevada and South Carolina and then Super Tuesday will quickly diminish whatever victory Iowa seems to provide.
Another thing that set the scene for the results from Iowa was that the impeachment of Trump came and went. Both sides had run out of material by the time they got to question time. One Republican Senator tried to introduce the name of the whistle-blower, but Justice Roberts refused to read that question, which indicates that everyone in Washington including the press knows who the whistle-blower is. Another Republican questioner asked about a newspaper report on Hunter Biden, but everyone knows that if the Republicans had anything on him they would already have leaked that. Some of the questions were abstruse. If the President has a personal motive as well as legitimate motives for his actions, is that reason enough to convict? Lawyers give away that their main virtue is posturing, sounding plausible when they are pointing out something that is supposed to seem like a simple act of logic when it is really an obfuscation. Who can or needs to parse out the levels of mixed motivation in anyone doing anything? Saying no bad motive can color an action is as arbitrary as saying that it can. Anyway, the issue here is not whether Trump had mixed motives but whether he had an illegitimate motive. FDR certainly hedged his speeches denouncing Germany in the runup to the 1940 election so that he would not be seen as a warmonger. That suited his political ambitions and also suited his desire to lead Americans gradually onto war. Alan Dershowitz was saying the same thing when he said Presidents could consult their political needs; he was not saying Presidents could do something illegal. Senators choose to misunderstand, while journalists do seem genuinely confused and so come out on the side of the issue that suits their political leanings. The result of all the huffing and puffing is that there will be no witnesses and the Presidential campaign can start, the Democrats making the rigged trial an issue and the Republicans sure to make Hunter Biden an issue. I and we have yet to see how Biden will handle that, given that the only limit on Republican calumny is whether they think they can get away with it. Joe Biden and his supporters are aware that any other nominee would be greeted by the same sort of attacks. Does Amy Klobachar have a love child somewhere out there?
Actually, Lamar Alexander had the best explanation of why to vote against witnesses in the Senate trial. He said there was enough evidence to convict Trump even without additional witnesses and that, anyway, it would be best to leave Trump off the hook because not to do so would deepen the animosity between Trump supporters and the rest of the population. Which means that Trump supporters, those deplorable and irredeemable people, have a veto power over the Congress, which sounds bad but maybe not really if we think that a greater test and token of legitimacy in the United States than the impeachment process is the quadrennial election of a President, and so Alexander wants to rely on that to resolve our difficulties with Trump. That, of course, is to rely on Trump not trying to again subvert the Republic before election time, and so hinges on his advisors telling him to not repeat his acts of collusion with foreigners and he taking their advice. Keep your fingers crossed.
Mitch McConnell claims that the impeachment was a partisan affair, brought to the Senate by a Democratically controlled House of Representatives, and the Senate had to do its Constitutional duty of being the more cautious branch of government and so turn back the usurpation of power by the House. What McConnell didn’t mention was that the Senate judgment that the President was not guilty was also partisan in that not one Senate Democrat was recruited to the “not guilty” side. You would think if people were capable of reason, then at least some Democrats would have seen the light. And if their eyes were clouded by pure partisanship, why could not the same be said in the other direction? Mitt Romney was the only Republican to vote “guilty”. So the whole exercise was partisan on both sides and the Republic will have to live with the fact that the Senate did not act as the impartial jurors they swore to be and which the Founding Fathers had intended them to be.
Another pre-Iowa Caucus observation was that the Caucuses don’t matter. The candidates are looking beyond them. They matter mostly in the minds of the media who get an event to hype and cover. Who cares about whop won the Grammys except those in the industry? Every candidate will find a reason to say they did well, given expectations. Joe Biden can look forward to Nevada and South Carolina; Warren and Sanders to New Hampshire; Klobacher and Buttigieg to the Vice Presidential nomination or to cabinet posts. Everybody wins.
And what happened, as surprising as it was to most observers, became a proof of that hypothesis. Iowa could not report its results and so everybody claimed victory except Biden, who reports say did badly, but the delay in reporting made no difference. The candidates campaigned on Tuesday in New Hampshire and looked to the future, each of their likelihood to capture the nomination not significantly diminished by the failure to have results from Iowa, just as would have been the case if there had been results. Iowa declared itself a nullity, which is what all the headlines said, which is true enough, but would have been the case even if its reporting systems had worked.
The animosity between the two political parties was apparent at the State of the Union Address last night, the event sandwiched between the Iowa Caucuses and the verdict of not guilty that took place at the impeachment trial today. The President did not shake hands with the Speaker when he handed over to her a copy of the speech he was about to deliver. She did not introduce him with the sentence “It is my distinct honor and privilege to introduce the President of the United States”, simply saying “The President of the United States”. The Vice President and the Speaker were barely cordial while sitting next to one another on the dias, exchanging no smiles or chit chat. It is to be remembered, however, that the animosity between the two parties is now of long standing and so does not depend on Trump, only on that sentiment that the Democrats are an illegitimate party. It wasn’t there in the Fifties when there was a liberal wing to the Republican Party or in the early Sixties when Dirksen and Johnson had a cooperative relationship. It set in, I think, at the 1964 Republican Convention, when Goldwater supporters booed Nelson Rockefeller when he came to the podium to deliver his speech. At that same convention, Goldwater security guards hustled John Chancellor, then the NBC floor correspondent, off the floor in sight of NBC cameras and Chancellor noted that he was not going limp, that being the pattern of demonstrators at the time, because he had been ordered not to do so by his control room. Communications are just as good if not better today, but the sense of the 64 Republican Convention that the two parties live in the same world just does not seem to hold. I don’t know how to mend that, no matter who gets to be President. Chris Matthews thinks the Republicans have made a deal with the devil. I am not so sure. They put up with Trump’s uncivil behavior because he doesn’t do anything really bad because he is too disorganized a person to carry out a fascistic scheme. And they get tax cuts for the rich and the cut back on environmental regulations and the judicial appointments that they want without upsetting the national applecart. So far, so lucky.
There is a major difference between the political parties back then and now. Back between the Forties and the Seventies, the Republicans regarded themselves as the mainstream party. They defended the Constitution, American traditional values and small town American life while the democrats were the not necessarily patriotic outlier party because they represented the big cities and the minority groups whose allegiance to America was uncertain. Things have changed. The Democrats claim to represent the Establishment. They defend the Constitution and long anointed processes while the Republicans are champions of the rowdies and those purportedly left behind by the economic and social changes that have gone on for a generation or two. Being on the outs makes the newly formed Republicans hysterical. They cling to their Second Amendment rights rather than to the First or Four Amendment because they imagine that only a rifle stands between them and the foreign like government which is invading their lives. They like Trump because he plays the outsider who portrays himself as cynical about the elites that rule America and he is just great because he doesn’t actually do very much for his constituents but he does persecute illegal immigrants and that suits his constituents just fine.
Who can take him on? One Democratic candidate is too old; another is a Socialist; another is just too young and untested; and the other two are women, and we know that a woman is not an easy sell for President. None of the Democrats seem a natural to beat Trump. That is the real result of the Iowa Caucus. None of the above is still the favorite choice. We will see whether the Democratic primary electorate will find one of these candidates as someone to come to love. They did with JFK and with Obama and maybe they will also do it with one of the current lot. As my mother told me, you may not love the man you marry, but you can come to love him.