Huckabee / Obama win Iowa Caucuses

First term Senator Barak Obama won the Iowa caucuses last night edging out his rivals John Edwards and former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in the opening bout leading to the New Hampshire primary only five days from now.

Matt Drudge reported Obama's win with 37.53% of support of Iowa's caucus goers compared with 29.88% for Edwards which relegated third place to Clinton with 29.41% of the vote. Mrs. Clinton badly needed to win in Iowa in order to blunt any doubt as to her viability as a presidential candidate and with a third place finish behind former Senator John Edwards of South Carolina the veneer of inevitability has come off of the New York Senator's campaign for the White House.

Yesterday morning, Chuck Todd of NBC News predicted the spin that the candidates would put on a win, lose or draw result from the Iowa caucuses. As Todd writes, "the Clinton team would rather lose to Edwards than to Obama. Third place would be a near-disaster scenario; (for Clinton)". Todd maintains that although the Clinton's might be down if dealt a third place finish, don't count them out. But Hillary is no Bill Clinton. As predicted, Clinton spun her third place finish as a "great night for Democrats" and vowed to "keep pushing as hard as we can."

New Hampshire awaits the candidates and as they gear up for the next five day bout of campaigning in the Granite State. Some of the presidential hopefuls wasted no time and are already in New Hampshire getting ready for the state's January 8th primary. The political winds of the cold Iowa winter will provide strong downwinds for the caucus winners and stiff headwinds for the losers. Those New Hampshire primary voters who were likely to support Hillary due to the specter of inevitability conferred upon her by the usual phalanx of political pundits can be expected to reconsider their backing of Mrs. Clinton in light of her third place loss to the upstart Obama.

Obama's campaign theme of asking voters to believe not just in his ability to "bring real change in Washington" but challenge to voters to believe in their ability to bring change struck a resonant chord with the Iowa electorate. The resonnance that Obama stirred with voters in this middle America state will not be dispelled by the former first lady's claim to embody presidential and world class leadership experience by virtue of her one-time window to the world from the vantage point of 1600 Pennsylvannia Avenue.

ABC News commentators George Stephanopolous and Charles Gibson noted that Clinton's support from Independents fell to a distant third behind Barak Obama, and also pointed out that her support among women fell to only 30% in contrast to 35% for Obama. These numbers point to serious weaknesses in the Clinton campaign which has put much stock in the support of Independents and women in order to portray her as a winning candidate for her party's nomination. Results like this will not bode well for Clinton in the upcoming primaries. As Captain's Quarters' Ed Morrissey points out Edwards finished two points lower than his 2004 performance in the Iowa caucuses during that contentious race. Hillary was unable to take advantage of Edward's decline to gain even the number two spot in Iowa!

On the Republican side Mike Huckabee walked away from Mitt Romney in his party's contest to win over the Iowa caucus goers. Huckabee finished the race with 34% of the vote leaving Romney trailing way behind at 25%. Fred Thompson finished the race with 13% of the vote, barely edging out rival John McCain who also garnered a statistical 13% leaving Ron Paul far behind with 10%, and Rudy Giulliani who barely spent a week in Iowa with 3% of the caucus-goers support. Republicans Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo finished at well under 1% of the vote in the Hawkeye state after the results were tallied.

Huckabee proved that he is a master in the art of retail politics. The former Arkansas governor excels at pressing the flesh, giving speeches on the stump and talking first-hand with voters. Romney, who is no slouch on the campaign trail outspent his Southern opponent by a margin of 20 to 1 and dispite a withering barrage of negative campaign ads aimed at his chief rival failed to carry the day in the tall corn state.

Analysts quickly pointed to polling data that showed that evangelical Christians were wary of endorsing a Mormon for president. Despite Romney's populist appeal and charismatic personality, voter ambivalence regarding his faith was cited as a major factor behind Mike Huckabee's major victory over the former governor of Massachusetts.

With New Hampshire in sight, the political landscape will change for the Republican candidates where conservative evangelicals do not hold sway over election results as in breadbasket states like Iowa. The Huckabee campaign will shift focus to sound a more poplulist theme in their message to voters in the upcoming primaries. With Huckabee's proven ability to connect with voters like those in his native Arkansas where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a sizeable majority and with the kind of folksy appeal that Huckabee displays with voters when he's out working the "stretched chicken" circuit, you can bet that a repeat of the Iowa victory is not out of the question at this stage of the race.

Four months ago Huckabee was an asterisk in the race for the Republican nomination as the party's standard bearer for 2008. Now his opponents must contend with a candidate who enters New Hampshire carried along by the strong winds of his Iowa victory behind him.