The winds of change are set to blow away the American right

[CHIMO]

For several years now, American politics has been in upheaval: terrorism, war, scandal, the meltdown of the Bush administration. But the results of Thursday's Iowa caucuses were the clearest sign yet that something transformative is happening - old orders are being cast away, new faces are surging forward. Iowa suggests that American voters are in a mood to place bets and take risks.

This is terrible news for the major party establishments. That was evident on Thursday night, on a chartered jet from Iowa to New Hampshire in the wee hours after the caucuses. On board was the press corps that follows Hillary Clinton, as well as her aides who worked their way down the aisle furiously spinning the night's disastrous results. With strained faces, the likes of longtime Clinton pollster Mark Penn and former Democratic party chairman Terry McAuliffe talked themselves hoarse over the engines, arguing that Hillary could survive a third-place Iowa finish some people consider a political death sentence.

Perhaps. But it's clear that in spurning the mighty Clinton machine for an upstart such as Barack Obama, Iowa Democrats were also rejecting their party's old guard. Likewise, in choosing the little-known Arkansan Mike Huckabee, Iowa Republicans also defied their party's establishment. GOP barons from Washington to Wall Street - the think-tankers, columnists and money men who supported the Bush administration - see the folksy preacher as an unelectable 'rube' with an intolerable weakness for higher taxes and social spending. But with Huckabee's clear win over Mitt Romney, they, too, were rebuffed just as thoroughly as were the Clintonites. Iowans of both parties have issued a call to reboot their political system.

It's too soon to say whether these insurgents can win their parties' nominations. (Obama's prospects look much better than the underfunded and more widely resisted Huckabee's.) But it seems likely that this taste for upheaval will carry through to the 2008 election. With no incumbent President or Vice-President on the ticket, and with the traumas of 9/11 and Iraq beginning to fade, voters will make a reassessment of their beliefs and preferences. In all probability, that will restore the Democrats to the White House after eight years of exile.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2236161,00.html