Iowa Expectations
Yesterday, Atrios offered:
My Iowa Prediction
While someone will come out on top, as with the polls the result will pretty much be a 3-way tie, and so this pointless contest given meaning only by the media will have even less meaning than usual, though that won’t stop them.
Today, Adam Nagourney said:
What if Iowa Settles Nothing for Democrats? - New York Times
DES MOINES — Iowa is packed with presidential candidates and hundreds of campaign aides, advisers and contributors. Twenty-five hundred representatives of news organizations have been granted credentials to cover the caucuses on Thursday night, twice as many as in 2004. Rarely has a political event been so intensely anticipated as a decisive moment, at least on the Democratic side. (It is different for Republicans since many of their major candidates are not competing fully here).
But what if it is not decisive?
What if at the end of Thursday, the three leading Democrats — John Edwards, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Barack Obama — are separated by a percentage point, or even less, leaving no one with the clear right of delivering a victory speech, or the burden of conceding? A number of polls going into the finals days that of have suggested that after all of this, the Democratic caucus on Thursday night will end up more or less as a tie.
This is the now the official, Progressive-blogger and mainstream-media approved, conventional wisdom: if the top three Dems are only separated by 5 or 6 points, it’s a tie.
You read it here third folks. But over the next few days, if you follow the news about the Dem caucus in Iowa, it will all be “three-way tie … three-way tie … three-way tie.”
I hope Duncan Black appreciates the irony of he himself now being a leading member of the punditocracy, the bobblehead-in-chief, as it were.
And beneath all this, lies the only obliquely referred-to, the wet dream of all political news junkies, the Holy Grail of the Politicos: THE BROKERED CONVENTION! Nagourney carefully slipped in this bit:
But if Iowans ended up being equally divided among what many party leaders view as an unusually strong cast of candidates, who is to say that voters in the Feb. 5 states will not be as well?
Heh. You know they all want it.
Messiah tops Glacier in Iowa*
Clinton: Mississippi ranks below Iowa
He’s not kidding this time
I, for one, welcome our new cornfield overlords
Department of Ten Foot Poles