So I've been glued to the Reason blog and Politico website to track the Iowans silliness. I have to admit I'm disappointed. I harbored a deep hope that the pollsters were missing a significant undercurrent of Ron Paul support. Clearly that was not the case.
On the bright side, he's still holding relatively strong with just under 10%. That's a pretty darn good showing for such a non-mainstream, relatively unknown still candidate.
Other good news is that Thompson made a good showing as well. I'll take time later to talk about my problems with him (primarily his anti-First Amendment stance on campaign "reform" laws). Having said that, he's better than most others on general philosophy of government.
Interesting news is that Romney got spanked. He spent $300 million in Iowa (okay, that's hyperbole, it was more like $7 million--still a great deal more than the others) and came a pretty distant second. We'll have to watch closely how, if at all, this affects his NH operation.
Which brings us to the bad news: the relative number of Iowans swallowing the Huckabee line. Very disappointing. The thing is, it seems the majority of his support is just on the singular basis that he used to be a preacher. Yet so few of these supporters actually look into what he believes about the issues he would have to decide as President. THAT is a major disappointment.
One final plus side: it actually was fun to spend a few minutes watching C-SPAN live at the caucuses where there were all these people excited to be a part of the process. We have a pretty amazing country and system--disappointment in the candidate field of this particular year aside, we should be at least a little excited to participate in the process of choosing our government.
Go figure, a libertarian-leaning GOPer who's a political system optimist during the 2008 election season.
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