Opinion: Iowa caucuses leave Hillary Clinton as the lone option for centrists

On the morning of the Iowa caucuses, I received the following text message from a friend in South Dakota: “Oh holy heck! Please tell me by some miracle a new candidate will just somehow appear and save the day in Iowa. Just not feeling good about this whole thing. We are talking future leader of the free world. Yikes!”

My friend’s entire life has been split between liberal Seattle and conservative South Dakota and the mix of bright blue and deep red has colored her politics plush purple. From that centrist position, she has a pretty balanced view of the current crop of candidates. Her verdict: “Look who’s out there — it seems crazy comical.”

Crazy, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. What one voter perceives as crazy is what another voter envisions as strong leadership. Nowhere is that more true than in Iowa.

The Iowa Republican Party has long been dominated by very conservative evangelicals who in the caucuses of 2008 and 2012, respectively, found Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum to be perfectly sane choices. This year, the social issues that those two men made the core of their campaigns were still important, but Iowa Republicans were more acutely freaked out by Muslims and Islamic State terrorists. One Republican voter in tiny Orange City told a Los Angeles Times reporter that the terrorists need to be stopped before they get to his “front door.” Another voter was worried that a jihadi terrorist attack could occur at a high school basketball game, even though it is vastly more likely that a lightning bolt would incinerate a tipoff in a rural Iowa gymnasium.

On Monday night, those fear-driven Iowa Republicans cast most of their votes for the three candidates who have taken the hardest line on national security. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has urged carpet-bombing the bad guys in the Middle East, took first place. Donald Trump, who proposes a temporary ban on Muslim immigrants and refugees, came in second. The most hawkish candidate of all, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, came in a very strong third. Those with more supple, nuanced positions, such as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and ex-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, were bereft of supporters.

Meanwhile, Iowa Democrats — 43% of whom identified themselves as socialists in a recent poll — raised Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders, a proud democratic socialist, into a virtual tie with Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. Before she exited Iowa to scoot off to New Hampshire where she is expected to lose outright to Sanders, Clinton made a strong statement that she, too, is a staunch progressive, thereby demonstrating that Sanders’ candidacy has pushed her well away from the middle-of-the-road politics that won her husband eight years in the White House.

Eventually, since Clinton is, after all, a Clinton, she will be able to ease her way back toward the political center if she becomes the Democratic nominee. (Sanders voters, in fact, expect her to do just that, which is why they love Bernie and do not trust her.) The three top Republicans coming out of Iowa, however, would have a much tougher time pulling off that trick.

Cruz would not even try. He is a hard-edged conservative ideologue and intends to run as such. Rubio, has a warmer demeanor and, by default, has become the last hope of more moderate Republicans, but Rubio rose in politics as a tea party partisan. He matches Cruz in his right-wing views and is even more militant on foreign policy. Among the three, Trump is the least conservative, yet there is little that feels moderate about him. When it comes to “crazy comical” in this campaign, he is the guy who defines the term.

Yes, American voters have begun the process of choosing the next leader of the free world and, thanks to Iowa voters, our alternatives already seem to be whittled down to a final five. Hillary Clinton may be singular because she is the only woman among them, but, in every other way, she is the most conventional choice.