DONALD TRUMP'S defeat in the Iowa Republican caucuses does not mean that this loud-mouthed racist is out of the running for the Republican presidential nomination but it does demonstrate that his campaign is not as unstoppable as it seemed. The pollsters who were predicting a victory for the billionaire got it seriously wrong. Rival Ted Cruz was a clear winner in the vote. Trump was unusually gracious in defeat, saying - with perhaps a hint of sarcasm - that he was honored that the state's Republicans had given him second place. The pundits who miscalled the result are now busy explaining why Trump lost. Their analysis is that the Cruz campaign stuck to the old-fashioned, telephone-bashing campaign. Their better organization got their voters out on Monday and trumped Trump, whose back office is as untraditional as his rhetoric. Indeed the politically-incorrect outsider will doubtless be reviewing his overdependence on his personal platform appearances. It may also now seem apparent that refusing to take part in the pre-poll Republican debate was a tactical error. Trump gave the impression of being too grand and too far ahead in the opinion polls to deign to lock horns with his rivals in a televised argument. He reckoned he had already won his point. He hadn't. But defeat though this is, in terms of the number of delegates he has won for the Republican convention, this was a setback rather than a rout. Ted Cruz gets eight delegates while Trump has seven. Interestingly Marco Rubio, increasingly the favored choice of the Republican party establishment, also picked up seven votes for the convention. The dubious doctor, Ben Carson, managed three. Jeb Bush, once considered a shoo-in for the Republican candidacy and Paul Rand each notched just a single delegate and the other six challengers, none at all. It was also grassroots campaigning by an army of predominantly young supporters that gave Democrat outsider Bernie Sanders a virtual tie with Hillary Clinton, each winning 50 percent of their vote, though with 22 delegates, Clinton has one more than Sanders. Clinton was visibly relieved not to have been clearly beaten by her self-declared socialist challenger. A serious defeat would have thrown the Democrat establishment into confusion, though few doubt that in the end Clinton will still get the nomination. Sanders' redistributive policies simply go too much against the grain of the American Way to make him electable in November. Ironically, it is also likely that Clinton campaign managers are grateful that there is such a stark difference between their candidate and the challenger. It makes the politics so much simpler. Sanders may be a "nice guy", whose core views have not changed since he marched as a student two rows behind Martin Luther King half a century ago, but he has limited political experience. He resembles Barack Obama, another nice guy, who has turned out to be an indecisive and lackluster president. Clinton, in sharp contrast, is a political prize-fighter who has already been in the White House alongside her husband Bill, where she was far from a meek presidential wife. She has political skeletons in her cupboard with which she will doubtless be challenged during the presidential election. But she also has the bruising experience of political power. Americans are not going to risk another Obama in the amiable shape of Bernie Sanders.
