| You know who really won the Iowa Caucus last night? Barack Obama's media team, who bought out the banner ads on the Des Moines Register's website.
Boo yah:
Image courtesy of @ggreeneva
As readers from Iowa and every other state in the nation clicked over to the paper to track caucus results, they were greeted with a banner reading "The Republican Candidates are leaving Iowa. But their terrible policies are here to stay." The left banner also points out how extreme and out of touch the GOP's platform is with regular Americans. "The Republican Plan" reads "hundreds of thousands of tax cuts for millionaires at the expense of the middle class," "go back to letting Wall Street write its own rules," and "send our troops back to Iraq." In other words, George W. Bush 2.0 but now with an angry Tea Party and Republican Congress to exacerbate the bad policies.
The ads are a sharp reminder of what's at stake in November: a chance to keep moving forward with Obama, or go back to the failed policies of the past. While the Republican candidates and most of the mainstream media left Iowa today, Barack Obama's team is still there on the ground organizing supporters.
Last night, that organization was evident as about 25,000 Iowans came out to caucus for Obama, even though his repeat win in the Hawkeye State was assured. Caucus attendees learned how to get involved with the campaign, and will immediately get plugged into an operation that's singularly focused on winning in November. To put the Democratic turnout in perspective, Romney himself only managed to gin up 30,000 votes after organizing non-stop in Iowa for years--and his primary is supposed to be the exciting one this cycle!
Now, granted, that 25,000 is a fraction of the 239,000 Democrats that caucused in Iowa in 2008. However, it's an impressive retention rate, and an illustration of Obama's ground game hard at work. More importantly, Democrats' 2008 turnout numbers dwarf the 120,000 Republicans who turned up last night. And that's an inflated number anyways, since only 75% of the caucus goers were self-identified Republicans. Ron Paul pulled a lot of Independents and you-should-be-ashamed-of-yourself Democrats in for him.
Of anyone running, it looks like Barack Obama's got the most momentum coming out of Iowa. |
