Throwing Cold Water on Iowa

Impressed with the writing even as I cannot agree with all the writer's points and hope that others are just wrong, I cannot ignore Iowa reveals the maverick rule of the US from Scotland's Sunday Herald:

First, can America remake the idea of democracy and return to its republican principles? This outsider would say, for example, that it has developed a dangerous dependency on oligarchs and dynasties. Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama, having produced their Iowa "shocks", may not appear to qualify. They do not bear the names Bush or Clinton, for one thing. But even the unprecedented bass-playing Baptist, and the unforeseen black American, have come through a system shaped around God, money, and political machines.

No mould has been broken. Nobody - not even Obama - has staged an insurgency. The ability of John Edwards to take second place from a tally of 1781 precincts may yet turn out to be Iowa's most significant result. We'll see. What we see thus far is a jostling crowd of the desperate to please, the careful-to-conform. Nobody is taking the world by storm. Nobody is charting an American future. There is no "vision thing". And none of this is accidental.