Monday, January 7, 2008

Bouncing

Why is it that there appears to be a significant bounce in NH after the Iowa caucuses? Suddenly people seem to be switching to Obama in droves (presumably from "undecided"s). Clearly, there is an electability factor --- he's won a primary, so he's now more respectable: she's damaged, so she gets hurt.
And yet, the same argument would suggest that Huckabee should at least be showing up on the NH radar, and he doesn't really seem to be doing so.

I suspect that something more basic is in play here: that all the candidates on the Dem side are relatively near to the public perspective on issues, and so are more interchangeable: whereas various Republicans are "conservative Christians" or "social conservatives" or "fiscal conservatives", implying a different view from orthodox republicanism on other issues. To me this says that the Republicans are the fringe party of the now, able to excite, even inflame small segments of the population on key issues, but not cohesive any more. Please, let it be so!

Yours, probably in error, in this as everything else in politics!
N.

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