A Bad Night For the Apparachniks

Last night was a very unusual night in american politics, the mainline parties reversed decades of trends to produce a surprise. It remains to be seen if this is a trend for the election or merely a fluke, but it's a promising sign.

The Dems: For most of my lifetime, the democrats have always nominated the most politically connected, establishment candidate they could. Very by-the-numbers, almost no charisma, very few ideas. Mondale anyone? Kerry? They were like Bob Dole with the quirkiness. If they do actually nominate Obama, it will be the first time in ages a candidate has come from outside the establishment to win the nomination. Which is to say, I am extremely skeptical they will do that. While third place has to sting, Hillary is clearly the establishment candidate and she is no where near out of it. Personally, I am tired of decades of the Clinton/Bush power share and would like to see some outside blood. My expecations are low, but no longer zero.

The GOP: The fruition of the Permenant Republican Majority strategy has yielded up a front candidate who not only beleives the Earth is 6000 years old, but says this with pride. Again, this is a little out of the box, with Romney being their version of Hillary with more god and fewer balls. Huckaee is not popular with the chattering rightwing blogosphere, nor with the party heads, yet is the logical conclusion of their faith-based approach to government (have faith in god and have faith that we know what we're doing because we're not liberals). Huckabee could be a huge problem for them going forward, but again, Romney is nowhere near out of it.

All in all, a good night.

Update: also there is this:

Beyond who won on each side, there's a very big partisan message out of tonight. Just under 220,000 Democrats caucused tonight. About 115,000 Republicans did. That is a very big vote in itself.

I'm not quite sure what this means. I don't, for example, beleive the tradiational percentages have gone away. I expect it means that the GOP field is weak and unexciting, so people aren't bothering to turn out. Also, I expect a lot of independents broke blue in Iowa.

Update II: NPR just reported that Romney spent $80,000,000 in Iowa! Really????!!!??? Holy Shit! $80M and he got second??? Is this true?
I might be wrong, he may really be toast if he can spend that much money and still come in behind Huck.