We're Dumb, But We're Not That Dumb!

Back in the summer I blogged about Why Barack Obama Isn't Winning, so now I guess I owe him one. Here it is:

Barack Obama won Iowa last night because he doesn't think we're stupid. Same for Mike Huckebee. Analysts will talk about voters who want 'change' or 'values voters', but none of that would have mattered if not for two candidates who did not talk down to their supporters.

Hillary Clinton seemed to think if she said the word "change" enough times, people might believe it. But her real problem is that people don't perceive that she's really comfortable with who she is. 'Changing' into someone else is just going to make that worse.

Similar thing for Mitt Romney. He throws around buzzwords like "Hillarycare" and "socialized medicine." I guess he's trying to scare up conservative voters from 20 years ago. But Mitt, we hardly know ye. And today's conservative Iowans showed little desire to vote for the robot clone of Ronald Reagan.

Message Matters More than Money. We saw it in 2000 with John McCain and we're seeing it again now. But its even more than that.

Huckabee and Obama are very different men on opposite sides of the political divide, but last night their speeches were so similar I thought the two could almost have exchanged scripts.

They both talked about uniting the country, about standing up for whats important to us without tearing ourselves to shreds, and about the real needs of real people who aren't that worried about 'Hillarycare' if they could just get somebody to care at all. No buzzwords. No scare tactics. No nonsense. Just keepin' it real.

They tell us over and over again that Iowa and New Hampshire are very different places and the voters there will ask different questions. Maybe. But isn't that the state that's reviving the hopes of John McCain? Oh, yeah. You see where I'm going.

I don't know who our next President will be, but "Keepin' it real" is already looking like the big winner in 2008.