21 January 2016
Cat Fight in Iowa
by J.R.Thomas
Mrs Clinton must be starting to get an awful sense of deja vu in Iowa. Eight years ago, the Democratic clear front runner for the Presidential nomination, she watched her commanding lead drift into Iowa snow as an eager 46 year old outsider, Barrack Obama overtook and then trounced her, effectively ending her campaign before it had got going.
This time the eager outsider is 74 years old and white haired, but he is as eager and energetic as Obama was then. Bernie Sanders, for it is he, shows no sign of letting up in his campaign and continues to gather support to such effect in Iowa that last weeks opinion polls showed him either level pegging or ahead of Hillary. In New Hampshire, whose primary is a few days after the kick off in Iowa on 1st February, Bernie is comfortably ahead and building his lead. In both of them, the outsider Martin O’Malley is nowhere to be seen.
Monday night was the fourth and final candidates formal debate, in Charleston, South Carolina, before the polls start across the various states. Like the scores in the opinion polls the commentators general views are that it was a narrow victory for Bernie, but one where he looked the more confident and comfortable – with O’Malley barely getting a word in. As we have suggested here before, there is a mood among American voters for change; Donald Trump signifies it on the Republican side, and, even if vanquished from the race, his pursuers Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio fit into that anti-establishment mould. On the Democrat side Mrs Clinton is the establishment candidate par excellence – how could she not be, as wife of a two term President and recent Secretary of State in her own right? But she is also a consummate politician and feels the chill wind blowing over establishment candidates. As she can hardly deny her forty five years of mainstream activism and the backing of the party machine, she has promoted herself as a sort of campaigning radical, moving to the left of her previous positions, but also trying the difficult trick of picking up the benefits of Democrat success over the last eight years, and further back. So she claims that it was her that laid the foundations of Obama care; and she that laid the groundwork for the Iranian settlement. But at the same time she wants a radical extension of free health care, and she has to try to look tough on extremism and the Islamic question.
This is not easy and Mr Sanders has been busy gently pointing out the discontinuities and discrepancies in her positioning. More damagingly, he also has made one of his main lines of attack that Hillary has received large sums of money from Wall Street banks for lecturing and speaking to their most favoured client events; and that she has in return gone light on banking reform. Bernie is going heavy on banking reform, and as the average American (not the ones that work for Goldman Sachs) likes big banks no more than the average Brit, this goes down very well at his rallies.
Bernie is also “clean” on the funding front – not like The Donald spending his own money, but being entirely funded by small contributions from individuals. Hillary has some of that too, but also a lot from rich Democrats and big business. She is very vulnerable in all of this area; and one might wonder as to what point. Bernie has raised around $30m from his small scale people’s funding – about the same as Hillary for her campaign so far. Nobody has asked though, and Hillary maybe should, how Bernie would run the remaining part of his nomination battle from small contributions, and even more, should it come to it, how he would fund a Presidential campaign.
All these issues came out in the debate and it became much more bad tempered than the three candidates meetings have been so far. The two main candidates shouted, spoke over each other, and made dramatic gestures. Mr O’Malley mostly kept out if it, a strategy that still might play off if the leaders mess each other up too badly.
But the truth is Bernie comes better out of these scraps than Hillary. He has a natural good nature and gentleness than goes down well with the audience, whilst Hillary is rumoured, strongly, shall we say, to have a fierce temper and a remarkable ability to deploy a rich vocabulary (we don’t mean Shakespearean). It shows, though she tries to control it on these occasions. And Bernie for all the Vermont folksy grandfather image is a skilled operator. A cheeky audience member asked Hillary (Bill silently by her side throughout) some question about Monica Lewinsky; Bernie leapt in to say that this was not relevant and that such questions annoyed him; though aducing that Bill’s “behaviour was deplorable,” adding “Have I ever once said a word about that issue? No I have not.” It takes an experienced politician to seize the moral high ground and point out the swamp all at the same time.
Mrs C feels that Sanders might be weak on gun control – he is against it in broad terms – and accused him accordingly. But Vermont is a state where the folks are rural and like to have a gun around the house, and the recent shocking events across the USA have actually caused an upsurge in gun sales – the average citizen’s view is that if there are bad people out there, get ready to defend your family. Bernie has rounded this circle by coming out for more and better background checks, but not restricting sales of weapons providing citizens pass them. This goes down well with the faithful, and makes Hillary look even more the metropolitan socialite in high heels.
So at the moment the Sanders campaign is running well and attracting more attention and more support; and Mrs C is struggling, both to engage the public sympathy and to poll well. But the outlook for the lady is far from all bad. Once the first two primaries are over, she moves onto territory much better for her. Iowa and New Hampshire are too rural (and the former, too religious) to be easy for her but things should improve; Nevada and South Carolina on February 20th and 27th respectively, then “Super Tuesday”, eleven primaries all on 1st March, with a special emphasis on the south. The south is very strong for the Clinton’s, due to Bills’ roots in the area and his role as Governor of Arkansas. The Good Ole Boys and Girls like the Clintons, or at least the Democrat ones do, and although Bernie must win Vermont that day, Hillary should be able to win a majority of the eleven. And the Clinton machine and money will start to show when fighting elections on that scale; Bernie could struggle simply to fund an eleven state campaign and to build a machine to back him so widely.
So Mrs C can lose in Iowa, bad, and in New Hampshire, expected, even in Nevada, not great, but then win say eight states maybe on Super Tuesday, big states at that, with lots of delegates to the National Convention, and be well ahead, maybe unstoppable, in the early spring. Can Bernie really get his folksy radical popularity so bigged up that he can stop that, and create national momentum?
There is just one flaw in this argument; that is exactly what everybody said when Mr Obama won in Iowa in 2008. And look what happened to him.
