ABC Iowa poll: Obama 30, Hillary 26, Silky 22

Shocka! All Silky has to do is slip a few more points and we may see that alleged Obama scandal-bomb detonated after all. The money graph:

The trend on this one’s surprising, too. You’d think the recent relative quiet in Iraq would benefit the most hawkish candidate of the three. Tain’t so:

Scroll down through the last five months’ of polls amassed by RCP and you’ll see that almost all of them have Hillary leading — with one of the few notable exceptions being the last ABC poll conducted in July. That one had Obama in the lead too, 27-26, with Silky tied for second with Hillary. In other words, this particular pollster has a history of being an outlier; you have to go back to a Newsweek poll conducted in September to find the last one Obama led in. That said, the fact that he gained three points while Silky lost four suggests how much Edwards is hurting Obama and how close the race might be in January if, as expected, he finishes third and drops out, leaving most of his supporters to gravitate to the Messiah. Might the press, smelling momentum, at last start to deliver some of the goods we all suspect they have secreted away? Dare to dream, my friends.

Rasmussen argues that Iowa only matters if Hillary wins or else loses by ten points. Really? Seeing Obama knock the crown off her head wouldn’t do anything to her aura of inevitability? Forgive me if I disagree. Exit question: Whom do we root for here? Instinctively, personally, nearly all of us prefer Obama, I suspect — but rationally we know we’re better off with the candidate with no principles than with the audacity of hard-leftism. Choose.

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