The winner is … no one

Source: Politico | February 4, 2020 | John F. Harris

Iowa shocks the nation in more ways than one.

“Iowa,” a smiling Pete Buttigieg said, shortly before midnight in Des Moines, “you have shocked the nation.”

Iowa had indeed shocked the nation, though Buttigieg’s line took a moment to decipher. It sounded at first like a taunt, an acidic side of this earnest young politician we had not seen before. With the Iowa caucus in a state of chaos—no official vote tally yet, no official word from the Iowa Democratic Party on when that might be coming—he might well be joining millions of Americans in jeering a highly unsatisfactory result.

Oh, wait, that’s not what he was getting at. Buttigieg was not mocking the abnormality of the moment. He was gamely trying to pretend that things were normal—that this was his occasion to do the usual thing after a caucus-night victory, to give a celebratory speech and a sermon about promising days ahead.

Once his intended meaning became clear, Buttigieg’s speech amounted to a weird capstone to a very weird night.

He said, “By all indications we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.” Perhaps he has some indications but by no means does he have “all indications.” Nor does anyone else.

By the time people get those indications, it’s not clear that they will matter. The very theory of the Iowa caucus was strained by Monday night’s vote-counting debacle. The idea, stretching back to Jimmy Carter’s coming-from-nowhere victory in 1976, is that a small-state could have large impact by going first and leveraging the power of theatrics. A win in Iowa is supposed to vault people to some new orbit in the public mind—the elusive force called momentum—and produce more victories ahead.

But the theatrics of Iowa have been ruined. The crowning of a winner Monday did not happen. Tuesday is Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. Wednesday is the day Trump is supposed to win acquittal in his Senate impeachment trial. Friday is another Democratic debate in New Hampshire, where voters cast primary ballots in a week. Iowa momentum may prove perishable—if it is ever there to harvest in the first place.

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