Here, I indicated on December 23, that I thought Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama would win the Iowa caucuses in their respective parties tonight. I also spoke of the parallel universes that are the Democratic and Republican presidential nomination races this year.
But are there commonalities between the two parties’ races?
I think so and it’s their common themes.
In selecting Huckabee and Obama this evening, members of both parties were choosing change.
This, of course, is probably more obvious in the case of the junior senator from Illinois. Obama’s very person symbolizes change, an American whose father is from Kenya, who spent much of his youth in Indonesia.
But Huckabee is an advocate of change as well. Admittedly, the former Arkansas governor is a rather conventional social conservative. But in repudiating George W. Bush’s foreign policy, characterizing it as arrogant, Huckabee advocates a departure from a neoconservative approach to national security and, effectively, a return to traditional conservative foreign policy. He also is a populist when it comes to domestic issues like education and concern for the poor.
Beyond the issues though, both Obama and Huckabee are change agents when it comes to their approach to politics. While both have flirted with or actually engaged in what most of us would describe as negative campaigning, they were, relative to people like Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney, positive in their approaches. Should the two of them end up being the nominees of their two parties, they will likely fulfill the yearnings of Americans for a race for president between grown-ups.