Analysis: Ideological conflict, generational drama, etc. etc.
is a column by POLITICO founding editor John Harris, offering weekly perspective on politics in a moment of radical disruption.
Iowa voters gave birth to a new star Monday night, as 38-year-old Pete Buttigieg capped a year-long flight from obscurity to finish atop the field. He was joined there by socialist Bernie Sanders, a man four decades his senior, in photo-finish results that promise an extended battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, with the two leaders offering sharply different visions: A return to centrist norms, or a leftist warrior who in his own fashion is as much a disruptive agent as Donald Trump.
All that stuff in italics….Is it true? Well, true-ish—certainly valid by the historic standards of post-Iowa blah-blah. One reason the gig lasted for decades was because of political reporting. There is an old tongue-in-cheek maxim about how to produce journalism: first simplify, then exaggerate. Generations of reporters applied those principles to writing about early-state results, investing them with significance that, once written or broadcast, was at least partly self-fulfilling.
Who knows how these results will change—most likely only at the margins, and too late for most people to care—when the rest of the votes are counted and released? --For Buttigieg, will his fine performance cause a larger group of people to view him in a new light? He probably doesn’t need to win New Hampshire to remain ascendant, but anything lower than third there and in Nevada and South Carolina would probably return to his candidacy to ephemeral status.
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