I plan on writing more about the direct effect of Iowa on poll numbers later today in my weekly roundup, but for now I think that the issue of what a black candidate winning in Iowa means is an interesting one and worthy of commentary.

Sharon Cohen has a piece today that went out of the AP newswire asking this very question, “Does Obama’s Win Show US Is Colorblind?” David Brooks of the New York Times went so far as to call Obama’s and Huckabee’s victories in Iowa, “The Two Earthquakes”, but is it really?

Jesse Jackson in 1988 won primaries in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, and DC and caucus victories in South Carolina and Michigan. But as Emory University political scientist Merle Black put it,

Obama is running in a way that a lot of white voters feel very sympathetic, he doesn’t make them feel guilty. He’s not running a Jesse Jackson campaign or an Al Sharpton campaign. He’s positioned himself to be a candidate who happens to be black, rather than a black candidate.

It is true that Iowa has a very small minority population as opposed to other states but Merle Black’s setiment is right, Obama’s campaign is not about willingness of democrats to vote for a black candidate, they have always seemed willing to do that. Instead of his victory being about black and white, about America’s colorblindness is it more like the two earthquakes that David Brooks wrote of, it is more of this,

He talks about erasing old categories like red and blue (and implicitly, black and white) and replacing them with new categories, of which the most important are new and old. He seems at first more preoccupied with changing thinking than changing legislation.

Obama won not because America is ready for a black candidate, or because America is colorblind, he won because he was able to do what no other candidate has seemed able to do, draw new voters to the polls, and to energize the young. Barack Obama is as Chuck Todd in the piece I referenced in my blog entry leading up to the Iowa caucus, a movement candidate, he wrote,

[Obama’s Victory] would suggest that more folks are getting involved in the Democratic Party process (more indies, more GOPers, more youth, etc.). And that’s a contagious thing with voters. But movement candidacies NEED victories; they die quick deaths if they lose — just ask Howard Dean.

The same is true about Mike Huckabee, he has been able to energize the evangelical base, the foot soldiers in the Republican party, and use them to score a victory in Iowa, he is very much a movement candidate, although decidedly not the same movement as Barack Obama.

Mr. Brooks was right when he called the results of Iowa the two earthquakes, but this campaign is not about race, it is about movements, and it will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

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