Winners and losers: After Iowa, where do GOP candidates stand?

By David McElroy · January 5, 2012

Now that the first votes have been cast in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, let’s take a quick look at where the seven candidates stand. We’ll go in order of finish on Tuesday.

Mitt Romney was the official winner on Tuesday, but he was more like a co-winner. He didn’t originally intend to make Iowa important to his campaign this year, but he did end up putting effort into the state when it became obvious that he could win with a last-minute push. The investment paid off and he’s now off to New Hampshire, where he should be a big winner. Grade: A

Rick Santorum has now become the latest conservative flavor of the month. He gained the most from Iowa, because he came within a few votes of winning the state, which brought him (at least for now) out of the pack and made him into a major contender. The question now is whether conservatives are going to line up behind this strong social conservative as the “anti-Romney.” I don’t think he’s a serious threat to Romney yet, although he has a chance to do well among religious conservatives in southern states. Grade: A+

Ron Paul was touted in the last couple of weeks as having a chance to win Iowa. His surprisingly strong poll numbers made him a serious candidate — probably for the first time ever — but also brought out more serious questions that probably hurt him. Since Iowa doesn’t have that many delegates, perception is more important than delegates in the state. The perception about Paul is that he had a shot at breaking through — and he couldn’t do it. Religious conservatives don’t generally like him and more establishment Republicans don’t like him for different reasons. Other than his rabid libertarian base, I see no place for him to pick up support. He will pick up enough delegates along the way to have some influence on the party platform, but he has no chance. Grade: B-

Newt Gingrich was the GOP flavor of the week about a month ago. Or has it been that long? It’s hard to keep track. It’s hard to see his campaign as anything except dead in the water. Surely everybody other than Gingrich knows that. In a space of mere weeks, he lost roughly half of his Republican support in Iowa. The better voters got to know him, the less they were inclined to vote for him. If he stays in the race much longer, it will only be because of his monstrous ego. Grade: D-

Rick Perry is a failed candidate. When he entered the race, I thought he had the look and feel of someone to challenge for the lead, but his dreadful performances in the candidate debates showed him to be a third-rate politician who wasn’t ready for the national stage. He acts like a man who’s accustomed to being a success — and is shocked that he’s not succeeding. I honestly think he expected to do well, and I suspect he’s puzzled that people don’t like him. He looks personally hurt about it to me. I expect him to quit and head back to Texas soon, where he has some oddly strange people who like the man. Grade: F

Michele Bachmann was always a joke of a candidate to me. Anyone who took her seriously as a candidate was either delusional or a member of her family. (Or both.) She appeals to a small segment of the socially conservative Christian vote, but there’s no evidence that anybody outside of that narrow slice knows her as anything other than a punchline to political jokes. She had nothing to offer politically. She was delusional and egotistical to think she even belonged in the race. Grade: F

I said earlier this year that I’m not a psychic, so I don’t necessarily like to predict election results this far in advance. But I’m ready to make at least a preliminary prediction. Unless something completely unexpected happens, Romney is going to win the nomination. If he does, he will defeat Barack Obama and be the next president. I’m not sure whether it’s more accurate to say that he will be the second term of Obama or the fourth term of George W. Bush. Neither is a compliment in my book.

So the long national nightmare called Campaign 2012 continues. The first chapter is closed and the road looks a lot more clear now. It will settle into a race between Romney and whatever candidate conservatives choose to coalesce around. There’s a slight chance it could still be Gingrich, but I don’t think so. (Gingrich is probably going to stick around and see how he does in South Carolina and Florida.) It’s more likely that social conservatives will rally around Santorum, especially in southern states. Bachmann has already dropped out. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Perry drop out any day now, too.

Paul will continue to the end. He’ll pick up some delegates and the eventual winner will court his supporters, probably even throwing him a bone or two at platform time. But in the end, his candidacy will achieve nothing, in my view. About 10 percent of the country is generally libertarian. Paul will get their support, but nothing more. I’ll be shocked if he finishes the race with more than 10 percent of the vote — at most.

So I predict the fall will bring us a Romney vs. Obama matchup. Now that we’ve seen the first votes, what’s your prediction? If you share a prediction in the comments, please explain why you believe a candidate is going to win. Don’t just advocate for the one you personally prefer.

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Why are children unhappier today than in the past? And why are today’s teens at least five times as likely to be clinically depressed as teens of 50 years ago? In this sobering article for Psychology Today, a research psychologist argues that children are being deprived of the opportunity to play on their own and take responsibility for themselves. Peter Gray is a professor at Boston College who specializes in the role of play in child development. He blames “coercive schooling” and the rise of additional adult-directed activities for taking away children’s sense of autonomy and self-ownership. Gray says this leads to anxiety and depression. I went through a very traditional system of schooling, but today’s children have even less control of their time than I did. Parents who think they are helping their children by controlling their time and giving them so many well-meaning activities are hurting them instead.

If you get here from Flipboard, you might have noticed that many of the keywords with which Flipboard tags my stories are horribly inaccurate. I’ve reported this to Flipboard, but the system is automated — and there’s nothing I can do about it. If I happen to mention something in an article, the automated algorithm at Flipboard often randomly picks that extraneous item as a tag. The article above, for instance, is about making personal changes inside yourself. I compared it to the process of renovating a crumbling old house which has been abandoned, so the Flipboard software thinks the article is about home flooring. Another recent article mentioned Tom Hanks — though it was about something entirely different — so the software tagged it as being about Hanks. So if you end up here expecting to read about flooring or about Tom Hanks, I apologize. I’m aware of the issue, but it’s a Flipboard problem beyond my control. I’ll keep looking for a way to change it if I can.

Do antidepressants work? It depends on who you ask and what standards you use. But a new Danish study concludes we just don’t know. There’s no question antidepressants make chemical changes in the brain, but the truth is that doctors don’t know enough about those brain processes to do anything more than try certain drugs and see what they do. The Danish study says that if antidepressants do help, the effects are tiny. I know plenty of people who swear they couldn’t live without their antidepressants, but the more I study about the root causes of depression, the more I suspect the placebo effect is what’s going on. Although some studies suggest these drugs have slight positive effects for some people, others argue that the positive effects are tiny — and that they cause more deaths than can be explained. There’s nothing wrong with using any drug that helps with something wrong with us — especially short term — but I’m coming to suspect that whatever good SSRIs and similar drugs do comes from masking our underlying issues, not fixing them. Denial is popular with humans, so it will be no surprise if this eventually turns out to be true.

Your brain has almost certainly tricked you into making bad romantic choices. A California psychology professor writes in Psychology Today that there are four things our brains do that cause trouble: 1) We think we know what we want — but we don’t. I’ve seen this in myself and if you haven’t seen it yet, you will. The things I wanted in a mate when I was young are completely different from what the mature version of myself wants. 2) We like more choices — as many as possible. We tend to believe that more choices lead to a better selection in all sorts of areas, but the truth is that too many choices tend to lead to the paralysis of failure to choose. 3) We try to be rational by “keeping our options open.” We’re scared to make the choices we need to make, because we’re scared of doing the wrong thing. This keeps us trapped in bad situations — and better choices eventually disappear. 4) We stay with the wrong people, because we don’t want our effort to go to waste. I’ve done this. Maybe you have, too. On several occasions, I’ve stayed in a relationship that I knew was dead and needed to end. At this point in my life, I know to trust my gut. It’s a lot smarter about most things than my conscious brain.

I just noticed that I’m approaching 3,000 subscribers for this site again. Although I’ve had plenty of individual days with far higher readership, the core of any site is those readers who are interested enough to subscribe and keep coming back. In the days when I wrote about politics, I hit 3,000 subscribers at my peak, but once I shifted focus, those subscribers started dropping like flies. These days, the readership numbers are still lower than they were when I wrote about politics, but I think it’s a better quality reader — people who are interested in something more important to long-term happiness than politics will ever be. I don’t know if I’ll hit 30,000 readers in one day anytime soon — as I did one day years ago when Rush Limbaugh and several conservative commentators linked to me — but I appreciate those of you who keep coming back again and again. I can’t thank you individually — and I don’t even know who you are — but I want you to know that I really appreciate you.

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