Gee, wasn’t Iowa just swell, Mike? Amen to that, Bro. Barack
Ah, Iowa. And just like that Iowa was packed up into crates and shipped off to New Hampshire where it will be used for something more like a real election.
And how about that Brother Obama and the Rev. Huckabee of the First Church of the Stump Speech? My how they shined brightly outside the little snow-covered corn fields of Iowa.
Whether Iowa was significant or relevant as to the future of this campaign can only be discovered in a historical context less one is a seer, or perhaps a seersucker. It’s like what I told a friend earlier in an e-mail concerning a completely different circumstance: “The only thing better than 20/20 hindsight is blowing bubbles out your a**.”
Perhaps even the next primary, or the next, or all the primaries will not foretell who the people really want to lead their respective parties or even if they want to retain the party system at all. Wouldn’t that really be a kick in the pantalones?
A time could come when CW (Conventional Wisdom and not the TV network) could become a relic. Horse sense, once defined in a Mad magazine cartoon I saw as the innate ability that prevents horses from betting on people, tells you that everything doesn’t turn out the same day after day. Like aspirin, no two snowflakes are alike and if you are fooled by twins you might quite possibly be a fool yourself. I know that I am. Polls especially seem vulnerable. One problem is the “cell phone guy.”
By cell phone guy I am not talking about that dorky-looking fellow in the Verizon commercials. I’m not even talking strictly about a guy. Instead, these are the people like several of my friends and even myself who no longer own a landline telephone but rather use a cell. We may not have lived in a certain area code, or even the state in which that area code is based, for years.
Now I am sure there are ways in which pollsters will be able to get around that problem. Maybe they can work around it now. Of course, I have never been called by a pollster on any of the cell phones I have used during the past six years and as far as I know the same can be said for probably most of my friends. On the other hand, I’ve never been solicited by a pollster using any kind of phone in all of my 52 years. So what do I know? Right, nothing or very little.
My background as a journalist tells me that editors and the political junkie political reporters are more interested in viewing the potentiality of a horse race, so to speak. But whether results of one primary election or caucus will tell us anything in the near or the distant future will be something better left up to serious historians, history students and those blowing bubbles out their a**.