So for Barack jocks, what’s not to like? The answer lies in the weird Expectations Game (EG) that dominates the early caucus and primary states, especially Iowa and New Hampshire.
It would have been better for Obama to stay neck-and-neck or even a little behind Hillary Clinton until Jan. 3, when Iowa caucus-goers venture into the cold for their strange democratic ritual. A surprise victory in the caucuses would have dealt a serious, even crippling, blow to Clinton’s campaign.
But if Obama opens up a decent-size lead, and Hillary comes closer than “expected,” she would then put her spinmeisters to work arguing that she had survived Iowa without having suffered great harm. She could be expected to argue that Obama won because he’s from neighboring Illinois, just as Richard Gephardt’s first-place finish in 1988 in Iowa was discounted because he was from neighboring Missouri. (Also-ran Michael Dukakis got the “Big Mo” out of Iowa that year and went on to win the Democratic nomination.)
This is ridiculous. Iowa is an almost all-white state, and if Obama wins there, it’s a big deal by any standard. But the EG will give his opponents an opportunity to argue otherwise.
The same logic applies to Mike Huckabee on the Republican side. Until recently, if Huckabee had surprised Mitt Romney with a strong second in Iowa, it would have been played as a big defeat for Romney and an advantage not just for Huckabee but for Rudy Giuliani, who is not expected to do well there (though better than John McCain, who is at 4 percent in Iowa and planning to all-but-withdraw from the contest, as he did in 2000).
Under this increasingly obsolete EG in the GOP, even a very narrow Huckabee win in Iowa would have given him a shot to win later primaries, despite lacking money. Now, though, there’s a new EG emerging, pushed by his rivals. (I’m not making this up.) Now a Huckabee win would have to be a comfortable one, or his performance will be written off there as comparable to Pat Robertson’s surprise second-place finish behind Bob Dole in 1988. The third-place finisher that year, incumbent Vice President George H.W. Bush, went on to win New Hampshire and sew-up the nomination just a few days later.
And that’s just the beginning of the craziness. Iowa isn’t really an election as conventionally defined. There’s no secret ballot (a hallmark of real elections worldwide) and it takes the better part of an evening to vote, a serious disincentive to participation, not to mention disenfranchising anyone who works a night shift.
On the Democratic side, candidates falling short of 15 percent of caucus-goers in a particular precinct (known as “viability”) lose their supporters to one of the “viable” candidates. Caucus-goers are asked to walk across the room and caucus with their second choice.
In other words, a second-place finisher who got there as a result of being a second choice of caucus-goers can end up with a first-class leg up on becoming the next leader of the free world.
There’s not a lot the media can do about this silliness except to resolve to analyze the caucuses the way an average voter would react.
So in Iowa and the states that follow, repeat after me: Forget the EG. A win is a win is a win. Got it?
