McClatchy polls Iowa

by shamanic

We are mere days away from the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucus everybody!

After a marathon three year primary race, a handful of battered, bitter Republicans and most of an exuberant Democratic Party are sprinting to the finish line as Iowans prepare to enter oracle mode on Thursday.

According to McClatchy, the top three Democrats are effectively tied, with John Edwards experiencing the magical "mo" in these final days. The +-5% breakdown is John Edwards with 24%, Hillary Clinton with 23%, and Barack Obama with 22%. That's a pretty amazing amount of neck-in-neckery.

Things are more clear on the GOP side, as the party has spent the past year racing from one shining savior to the next: Mitt Romney to Rudy Giuliani to Fred Thompson to Mike Huckabee, and unsurprisingly, having exhausted all avenues of escape from its fate, the Iowa party has resettled on plan A, Multiple Choice Mitt, to lead it in the general.

(Moment of Commerce Moment: I have a selection of attractive "Multiple Choice Mitt" t-shirts for sale at Cafe Press (link fixed. Appears I was logged into Cafe Press when I copied the link), in which a candidate who faces many directions at once asks, "What do you want me to believe today?" I really hope he's the nominee. I can make a killing!)

Anyway, he's leading last week's GOP savior Mike Huckabee 27% to 22%, the religious right having realized that, "oh God, what if we get the nomination and lose???" and perhaps more troublingly, "oh God, what if we get the nomination and WIN???"

I worry about that too, so I appreciate the solidarity of the fringiest Americans in choosing to go with a hollow ambition machine rather than someone who, you know, actually believes all that crap.

(And no, I don't mean that Christianity is crap. That would be ungenerous and unfair. I mean that today's Republican Party is crap, which while also being ungenerous and unfair, does have the unavoidable merit of being The Truth.)

Moment of Disclaimer Moment: Who the hell is home to answer the phone between Dec. 26-28? I'll tell you who: the people whose lifestyles don't let them be anywhere other than Iowa. Also, people with landlines. Who uses landlines? Oh, and it's the Iowa caucus, so it's really anybody's guess in the end. THURSDAY PEOPLE. This thing could be all sewn up in like five weeks.