Hopeful Signs in Iowa

Latest Iowa Power Ranking: Edwards On Top Again

The following piece is published on Iowa Independent as well as HuffPost's OffTheBus.
Today, Iowa Independent releases its second round of Democratic Power Rankings, seeking again to answer the question, "If the caucuses were held tonight, what would be the results?" Our hope is that although our methodology is notably unscientific, the list below will provide our readers one more point of reference while reading horse-race stories from day to day.
Although much has happened over the past two weeks, a lot has stayed the same. Polls, which fail to account for many important variables, continue to show the top three contenders in a dead heat in Iowa. Candidates have all spent significant amounts of time here at campaign appearances and forums. Field staff continue to make their calls, identifying new supporters and retaining as many previously identified supporters as possible.
Our focus in compiling these lists is largely on organization, one of the single most important indicators of caucus success. But this week, we have also added indicators of candidate momentum in the cases where we feel it is warranted. As history proves, momentum is as powerful a force as any other in the last month of the presidential campaign in Iowa.
First Place
John Edwards -- Although his endorsement from Congressman Bruce Braley did not come as much of a surprise (Braley was a strong Edwards supporter in 2004), it will certainly help assuage fears among his supporters that his candidacy has lost its momentum. And, as revealed Monday morning on a conference call, the former North Carolina senator has recruited multiple precinct captains in 87% of Iowa's precincts, demonstrating the continuing superiority of his grassroots organization.
Second Place
(tie) Hillary Clinton -- In our first Power Rankings, Clinton ranked third, but she has shown many signs of life recently that indicate she deserves a higher position. Her husband campaigned for her in Eastern Iowa last week, helping to shore up her supporters there; and she herself has spent time on the ground in less likely places reassuring leaners that she still takes Iowa seriously. Although her more aggressive attacks on Sen. Barack Obama may damage her already-low second-choice support, they should also reassure her supporters that she deserves their time and effort on caucus night. And the entree of Emily's List's new voter outreach program may be a help, as well.
(tie) Barack Obama -- Upward Momentum -- Polls have confirmed what we have felt anecdotally for a long time: that Obama's message resonates equally well among women as it does among men, and that's before Oprah Winfrey has even arrived. The gender and age gaps both show signs of closing, and his campaign's crowd-building skills are unparalleled. His subtle criticisms of Clinton over the past month have forced Clinton to issue less subtle criticisms of her own, perhaps demonstrating the direction her campaign sees the race heading. If any candidate will usurp Edwards's first-place position between now and January 3, Obama appears best positioned to do so.
Fourth Place
Joe Biden -- Upward Momentum -- Biden has mastered the art of retail politics better than perhaps any other candidate in the race, and it shows not just in his campaign events but also in his organization's ability to capitalize on social networks and the political capital of his endorsers. His base is more likely than any other candidate's to actually attend the caucuses, and his second-choice support continues to increase.
Fifth Place
Bill Richardson -- Richardson has a large staff that has been building lists since June, but he lacks support from traditional activists and politicos around the state, as evidenced by his very short list of state legislative endorsements. His staff will not be able to do all of the necessary work for getting out the vote alone. And although he is committed very seriously to grassroots campaigning, he is unpolished and inconsistent on the stump.
Sixth Place
(tie) Chris Dodd -- Dodd's campaign has been promising from the start, but his second-choice support still seems far stronger than his first-choice support. FIrefighters have been working diligently across the state to support him, but he will need a major shake-up in the race in order to advance. His focus on other candidates' votes on bankruptcy "reform" legislation is promising, but attacking Edwards, Clinton, and Biden may cost him more than he gets in return.
(tie) Dennis Kucinich -- Kucinich spent little to no time in Iowa in the first nine months of the campaign, but over the past week he has spent at least some time reaching out to his base of supporters from 2004. Although he has likely started too late in the game to build a strong organization, he may have shown enough signs of life here to reassure small factions of the electorate that he deserves their support.
Eighth Place
Mike Gravel
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President Giuliani. President Romney. President Huckabee. President Just-Shoot-Me.
Marty Kaplan
In America, anyone who wants to can grow up to be president. That's the problem.
There is no guarantee at all that the next occupant of the Oval Office will be as opposed to the Iraq war as the vast majority of the American people have been for several years. There is no reason to assume that the White House will be held in 2009 by someone who believes that what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have done to the Constitution constitutes impeachable high crimes. It is today entirely possible that the next president will leave health care to the pharmaceutical lobby, energy policy to the oil companies, and science to the Scriptures. There is nothing remotely comforting about our current system for selecting presidential candidates, about the way presidential campaigns are conducted and covered, or about the process in which ballots are cast, counted and translated into electoral votes. To think otherwise is denial, wishful thinking -- the magical thinking of children.
Despite all this country has gone through, anything can happen next November. Why should we believe that 2008 will not produce a president as incompetent and lawless as 2004 did, or as unelected as 2000 did?
If we think the news media in 2008 will rescue us from lying and demagoguery, we must have slept through its coverage of the run-up to Iraq, its yawning at Valerie Plame's outing and the Justice Department's corruption, its enabling of the Social Security "crisis," of "amnesty" propaganda, of the "other side" to evolution and climate change.
If we think that three billion dollars' worth of campaign ads in 2008 won't persuade Americans that day is night and black is white, we must not recall the Swift Boating.
If we place our faith in the critical thinking skills of the American people, we must have amnesia about the majority persuaded that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.
If we believe that turnout in November 2008 will be unprecedented, we must also believe that voter caging, voter roll-purging, voter intimidation, papertrail-free machine voting, dubious election eve indictments, and the rest of the Rovian coup technology will somehow, perhaps out of the goodness of their own hearts, have been renounced by the Republican executive branch overnight.
What I'm trying to get at is the stupendous sense of powerlessness among our citizenry that our current political system has created. It's as though the best democracy can do is to cough up this beast that we're being required yet again to ride. The nominating system, despite the folksy patina that quadrennially makes reporters swoon, is thoroughly idiotic, and it's gotten worse every time than the cycle before, yet we treat it like a force of nature, not an act of hacks. Money is more important than ever. And though the Web has enabled unprecedented citizen pushback on candidate deception and media spinelessness, its reach feels puny, compared to the paid messages that special-interests can buy in the marketplace; its impact feels impotent, compared to the partisan fearmongering posing as news and the circus acts masquerading as information on our mass media.
Electability is much on Democrats' minds. But no matter who runs against the GOP next fall, the political system we pretend to have inherited from the Founders could still produce a President Giuliani, a President Romney, a president more Bush than Bush, more Cheney than Cheney. This is not the genius of American democracy. This is the pathology of a terrible systemic illness. Some people may be too busy waving flags or scarfing corn dogs to notice the symptoms. But for many, perhaps most, our political system's sickness is so clinically depressing that sleep seems the only available alternative.
I fully understand the conventional wisdom among insiders. Impeachment? Off the table. Reform? Been there, done that; the unintended consequences'll kill ya every time. Revolution? Puh-leeze. Call me when there's a draft. The closest I hear to a call for the kind of change we need is the mushy-mouthed bipartisanship so beloved by editorialists; if that means finding common ground with the likes of Mitch McConnell and James Dobson, then count me out.
I know, too, that polls put issues like campaign finance reform, political reform and media reform way down low. But I wonder whether Americans, given the choice, might actually put "I feel totally bummed out and disenfranchised by what democracy and politics have become" near the top of their presidential season bitch list. The only problem is, given our melodrama-lovin' media, I wouldn't put it past some two-bit despot or third-party opportunist to ride that wave of outrage all the way to the White House.
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National debt grows $1 million a minute What's that mean to you?
It means almost $30,000 in debt for each man, woman, child and infant in the United States.
Even if you've escaped the recent housing and credit crunches and are coping with rising fuel prices, you may still be headed for economic misery, along with the rest of the country. That's because the government is fast straining resources needed to meet interest payments on the national debt, which stands at a mind-numbing $9.13 trillion.
And like homeowners who took out adjustable-rate mortgages, the government faces the prospect of seeing this debt — now at relatively low interest rates — rolling over to higher rates, multiplying the financial pain.
So long as somebody is willing to keep loaning the U.S. government money, the debt is largely out of sight, out of mind.
But the interest payments keep compounding, and could in time squeeze out most other government spending — leading to sharply higher taxes or a cut in basic services like Social Security and other government benefit programs. Or all of the above.
A major economic slowdown, as some economists suggest may be looming, could hasten the day of reckoning.
The national debt — the total accumulation of annual budget deficits — is up from $5.7 trillion when President Bush took office in January 2001 and it will top $10 trillion sometime right before or right after he leaves in January 2009.
That's $10,000,000,000,000.00, or one digit more than an odometer-style "national debt clock" near New York's Times Square can handle. When the privately owned automated clock was activated in 1989, the national debt was $2.7 trillion.
These guaranteed retirement and health benefit programs now make up the largest component of federal spending. Defense is next. And moving up fast in third place is interest on the national debt, which totaled $430 billion last year.
Aggravating the debt picture: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates could cost $2.4 trillion over the next decade
Despite vows in both parties to restrain federal spending, the national debt as a percentage of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product has grown from about 35 percent in 1975 to around 65 percent today. By historical standards, it's not proportionately as high as during World War II — when it briefly rose to 120 percent of GDP, but it's a big chunk of liability.
"The problem is going forward," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard and Poors, a major credit-rating agency.
"Our estimate is that the national debt will hit 350 percent of the GDP by 2050 under unchanged policy. Something has to change, because if you look at what's going to happen to expenditures for entitlement programs after us baby boomers start to retire, at the current tax rates, it doesn't work," Wyss said.
With national elections approaching, candidates of both parties are talking about fiscal discipline and reducing the deficit and accusing the other of irresponsible spending. But the national debt itself — a legacy of overspending dating back to the American Revolution — receives only occasional mention.
Who is loaning Washington all this money?
Ordinary investors who buy Treasury bills, notes and U.S. savings bonds, for one. Also it is banks, pension funds, mutual fund companies and state, local and increasingly foreign governments. This accounts for about $5.1 trillion of the total and is called the "publicly held" debt. The remaining $4 trillion is owed to Social Security and other government accounts, according to the Treasury Department, which keeps figures on the national debt down to the penny on its Web site.
Some economists liken the government's plight to consumers who spent like there was no tomorrow — only to find themselves maxed out on credit cards and having a hard time keeping up with rising interest payments.
"The government is in the same predicament as the average homeowner who took out an adjustable mortgage," said Stanley Collender, a former congressional budget analyst and now managing director at Qorvis Communications, a business consulting firm.
Much of the recent borrowing has been accomplished through the selling of shorter-term Treasury bills. If these loans roll over to higher rates, interest payments on the national debt could soar. Furthermore, the decline of the dollar against other major currencies is making Treasury securities less attractive to foreigners — even if they remain one of the world's safest investments.
For now, large U.S. trade deficits with much of the rest of the world work in favor of continued foreign investment in Treasuries and dollar-denominated securities. After all, the vast sums Americans pay — in dollars — for imported goods has to go somewhere. But that dynamic could change.
"The first day the Chinese or the Japanese or the Saudis say, `we've bought enough of your paper,' then the debt — whatever level it is at that point — becomes unmanageable," said Collender.
A recent comment by a Chinese lawmaker suggesting the country should buy more euros instead of dollars helped send the Dow Jones plunging more than 300 points.
The dollar is down about 35 percent since the end of 2001 against a basket of major currencies.
Foreign governments and investors now hold some $2.23 trillion — or about 44 percent — of all publicly held U.S. debt. That's up 9.5 percent from a year earlier.
Japan is first with $586 billion, followed by China ($400 billion) and Britain ($244 billion). Saudi Arabia and other oil-exporting countries account for $123 billion, according to the Treasury.
"Borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from China and OPEC puts not only our future economy, but also our national security, at risk. It is critical that we ensure that countries that control our debt do not control our future," said Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio, a Republican budget hawk.
Of all federal budget categories, interest on the national debt is the one the president and Congress have the least control over. Cutting payments would amount to default, something Washington has never done.
Congress must from time to time raise the debt limit — sort of like a credit card maximum — or the government would be unable to borrow any further to keep it operating and to pay additional debt obligations.
The Democratic-led Congress recently did just that, raising the ceiling to $9.82 trillion as the former $8.97 trillion maximum was about to be exceeded. It was the fifth debt-ceiling increase since Bush became president in 2001.
Democrats are blaming the runup in deficit spending on Bush and his Republican allies who controlled Congress for the first six years of his presidency. They criticize him for resisting improvements in health care, education and other vital areas while seeking nearly $200 billion in new Iraq and Afghanistan war spending.
"We pay in interest four times more than we spend on education and four times what it will cost to cover 10 million children with health insurance for five years," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. "That's fiscal irresponsibility."
Republicans insist congressional Democrats are the irresponsible ones. Bush has reinforced his call for deficit reduction with vetoes and veto threats and cites a looming "train wreck" if entitlement programs are not reined in.