Iowa caucuses

To me, this time of year is like the playoffs.
Politics is, afterall, a competition like no other.

I'm fascinated by two things (well, all of it, really)

1. The Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton duel.

Polls are all over the place on this one. One poll showed Clinton opening a 15 point lead, which seemed crazy because Obama's was surging and had actually slipped ahead over the last several weeks. I saw on CNN last night how the Democratic caucuses work. It's a crazy system with no secret ballot, the ability to switch sides if your guy (gal) doesn't have 15 percent of the room. And then, after it's all said and done, they don't tally the votes but assigne delegates to the person with the most votes, and the delegates are counted in the final tallies. (I'm still unclear exactly how that works)
Pretty amazing that 120,000 Democrats in Iowa will have such influence over that party's nominee. Seem's out of whack.

2. Mike Huckabee
This guy could charm the warts off a frog. He's getting attacked now because he's made this miraculous jump in the polls. And indeed some of his positions deserve scrutinty, like junking the income tax for a national sales tax. Some "true" conservatives feel he is too liberal on spending issues like education, health care, etc. But his rise is a populist movement, and his support realigns, to some degree, the social and fiscal conservative majority the Republicans have held and creates a new coalition of social conservative who don't hate government but think it could be used for good. This, it seems to me, could be a lasting alignment.
Republican rules at the Iowa caucuses are more simple and sensible. Secret ballot, every vote counts. This sort of reflects the reputations of the parties - democrats fractured and all over the place, republicans organized and on message