It is not enough for Barack Obama to have won the Iowa caucuses on the Democratic side, which he’s now done. Hillary Clinton also needs to come in third, which is where she is right now, just a hair behind John Edwards.
“Even if your candidate didn’t win tonight, you have reason to celebrate…we all do,” Arianna Huffington wrote a little while ago. “Barack Obama’s stirring victory in Iowa — down home, folksy, 92 percent white Iowa — says a lot about America, and also about the current mindset of the American voter. Because tonight voters decided that they didn’t want to look back. They wanted to look into the future — as if a country exhausted by the last seven years wanted to recapture its youth.
“Obama’s win might not have legs. Hope could give way to fear once again. But, for tonight at least, it holds a mirror up to the face of America, and we can look at ourselves with pride.”