Peggy Noonan with the Wall Street Journal has her list of reasonable and unreasonable candidates that could emerge from the Iowa caucus.
Reasonable GOP Candidates: Mitt Romney, John McCain, Duncan Hunter, and Fred Thompson.
Reasonable Democratic Candidates: Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson.
Noonan outlines her reasons why each candidate is reasonable or otherwise. Surprisingly, the only Paul that gets mentioned is – John Paul the Great, the subject of Noonan’s 2005 book. Hunter, Thompson, and Richardson all seem to get short thrift as being reasonable, bu not worthy of analysis (or perhaps they are so reasonable as not to merit discussion on the point).
Guliani she describes as reasonable… but undesireable, and defers her rationale for another time. It’d take me an op-ed to go through the litany as well. John “The Breck Girl” Edwards also gets the dubious honor of being both unreasonable and undesireable. I’d agree, and for the same reasons Noonan describes.
As for me, I have no worthwhile predictions/recommendations on the Iowa caucus. The real battle starts in New Hampshire, gets decided in Michigan, and ends on February 5th. If the Virginia Republican primary were held today, there’s no question that Virginia would go strongly for Thompson.*
* EDITORS NOTE: I was originally going to write “go strongly Thompson” until my six-year old son Jonathan told me this was improper English. Pfft… kids nowadays with all their knowledge and book learnin’…