The three-way victory in the Iowa caucuses last night reveals just what a catastrophe for the Republican Party the Year of 16 Debates was.
The relentless televised clashes of 2011 gave ridiculous heft to the freak candidacies of Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich — to the detriment of the party’s standing in its long-term struggle to defeat Barack Obama.
In the end, last night, only the candidates who did the hard work of actual conventional campaigning — Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul — made it to the top tier in Iowa. They built organizations, spent time in the state and brought their messages to county after county and voter after voter.
The only virtue of Debate Year 2011 was its exposure of the unfitness of Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, who would have walked into the nomination if he had been at all suitable.
Debate Hell provided terrific copy for pundits, led to record ratings for cable-news channels, and helped enshrine Twitter as the news flavor of the moment. But it made the Republican Party look foolish and silly, not serious and sober in facing the problems of the present with solutions for the future.
In that sense, the debates were worse than a waste of time. They were a self-destructive exercise. Both parties better wise up and figure out how to limit the takeover of the process by cable television and these interest groups between now and 2016 — or whichever one of them has an open run for the presidential nomination in 2016 will be humiliated in the same way.
As for the photo-finish Iowa results, the liberal media will certainly try to make hay out of the showing of the extremist outlier isolationist Ron Paul, but the “entrance polls” last night indicated that nearly half of his voters were independents, not Republicans — and independents are not going to choose the GOP nominee.
The thrill for everyone else is the unexpected surge of former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, because a guy coming out of nowhere is an interesting story — and his rise complicates matters for Mitt Romney.
It may be that Santorum can leverage his strong late showing in Iowa into a genuine national challenge to Romney. The results last night make it clear that Romney is unquestionably the weakest party front-runner in contemporary political history, scoring fewer caucus votes in Iowa in 2012 than he received in 2008.
Santorum is intelligent and knowledgeable and is the most commanding voice on foreign affairs in the field.
His working-class background and social conservatism give him a leg up as well against the wealthy and socially vague Romney.
But if Romney is having trouble generating enthusiasm, Santorum has a history of not wearing well. His 2006 slaughter at the hands of the voters in Pennsylvania in his bid for a third term in the Senate attests to that. Moreover, Santorum suffers from foot-in-mouth disease and a tendency toward finger-wagging preachment.
So the race may be coming down to a one-term Massachusetts governor who can’t close the sale with more than a quarter of Republicans after running nonstop since 2007 and a two-term Pennsylvania senator who lost his last election by 18 points.
And you know what? If things are pretty much as they are today come Election Day in November, either one of those guys will beat Obama handily. At least they will have had a lot of debate experience.