“I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee,” former Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson told ABCNews.com today. Well, you know what, he’s probably right.

Obama won 37.6 per cent of the vote. Edwards won 29.7 per cent and Clinton won 29.5 per cent, according to results posted by the Iowa Democratic Party.

“Our voters and Edwards’ voters were the same people,” Wolfson said the Clinton polls showed. “They were older, pro-union. Not all, but maybe two-thirds of them would have been for us and we would have barely beaten Obama.”

So what. That presumes the only dynamic was that it was Clinton v. Obama. The fact of the matter is - that wasn’t the only dynamic.

First, I’d have to disagree with Wolfson in that “Our voters and Edwards’ voters were the same people…,” in fact, they are likely more to be aligned with Obama than with Clinton. Obama and Edwards were much more closely aligned, policy-wise, than Clinton. Both are populist progressives. Both claimed the mantle of “change” and the anti-Clinton vote.  It is not a slam-dunk case to say that Edwards people would have voted for Hillary if Edwards had not been in the race.

Second, the real calculus Wolfson is making here is that Hillary shutting out Obama in Iowa, and later New Hampshire, might have been the “big mo” she needed to stop the “Obama Express.” I quite frankly don’t buy the argument that the Clinton campaign knew this fact about Edwards, but decided not to use it. “Any of the campaigns that would have tried to push that would have been burned by it,” said Wolfson.

Nonsense. Bottom line is “they didn’t have it” cleanly enough to make it stick. Otherwise, I am convinced they would have given it to a 529 organization to pound Edwards. Tactically, they would have been idiots to do otherwise - and while the Clinton campaign suffered from hubris, it did not suffer form stupidity.

But nevertheless, Obama represented a real and growing threat to the Clinton campaign because Clinton was painted to represent the “old Democrat party,” and Obama was the “new hip thing… the JFK of this generation,” and quite frankly, the idiotic, the young, and the impressionable couldn’t wait to vote for him. They went ga-ga for Obama like their predecessors in the 1960’s when crazy for Kennedy. Hillary couldn’t stop that momentum - even if video of Edwards having sex with his mistress had aired on CNN live.

Third, again - so what? As I say to my friends in Virginia who complain about the “War of Northern Aggression” (that would be the Civil War to those of us who are above the Mason-Dixon line), you fought, you lost, get over it.

Although, I find it amusing. Here the DNC is less than 3 weeks before its convention. Obama has still to unify the party behind his rousing message of “hope and change and a better tomorrow,” Hillary is threatening to have a nomination round with her on the ballot, her henchmen are out claiming she’d be the nominee if Edwards had exploded sooner.

If McCain loses - he can’t claim he didn’t get like every break possible. The only thing that would have been the trifecta would have been if Obama had chosen Edwards as VP, and then he exploded. Saved by the paternity bell I suppose.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Barack Obama is the 44th President Elect of the United States.
• Election Day.
• The Obama Gaffe
• The Obama Badge of Honor: Snubbing the Free Market
• Joe the Plumber… why Joe matters…