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My mantra for Obama has long been, "if he runs, he wins." Today David Brooks (of all people!) captures the Obama juggernaut perfectly:

This is a huge moment. It’s one of those times when a movement that seemed ethereal and idealistic became a reality and took on political substance.

Iowa won’t settle the race, but the rest of the primary season is going to be colored by the glow of this result. Whatever their political affiliations, Americans are going to feel good about the Obama victory, which is a story of youth, possibility and unity through diversity — the primordial themes of the American experience.

And Americans are not going to want to see this stopped. When an African-American man is leading a juggernaut to the White House, do you want to be the one to stand up and say No?

And his take on Huckabee is quite right as well:

Huckabee won because he tapped into realities that other Republicans have been slow to recognize. First, evangelicals have changed. Huckabee is the first ironic evangelical on the national stage. He’s funny, campy (see his Chuck Norris fixation) and he’s not at war with modern culture.

Second, Huckabee understands much better than Mitt Romney that we have a crisis of authority in this country. People have lost faith in their leaders’ ability to respond to problems. While Romney embodies the leadership class, Huckabee went after it. He criticized Wall Street and K Street. Most importantly, he sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had at him, and their diminished power is now exposed.

Third, Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived. Democrats talk about wages. But real middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. A person’s lifetime prospects will be threatened more by single parenting than by outsourcing. Huckabee understands that economic well-being is fused with social and moral well-being, and he talks about the inter-relationship in a way no other candidate has.

In that sense, Huckabee’s victory is not a step into the past. It opens up the way for a new coalition.

A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.

I guess Brooks has more faith in social/religious conservatives than I do. When I hear Huckabee, I hear a man who is less openly hostile towards modern culture, but who is nevertheless still very much at war with it. If the previous generation was waging an overt war, he's waging a covert one. But make no mistake about it - both generations reject the enlightenment. Their faith is in faith, not reason.

That said, Brooks' point about the potential for a new GOP coalition is an important one. Realignments aren't just about organizing a new majority party, but about reorganizing the entire party system itself. New cleavages replace old ones. New issues become dominant, while old ones fade away. New narratives replace old ones. Across the entire spectrum, the patterns of politics shift and change.

UPDATE: OK... enough with the praise for Brooks. Reread this line and think about how nonsensical it is for someone like Brooks to write it:

A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.

I wonder what precisely Brooks thinks he has been doing with his columns for the past decade or two? Good grief.