SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

Kerry rallies in Ames, Iowa in the final hours before the caucus

        If there was one message blowing out of Iowa on Tuesday night, it is that Democrats want to beat George Bush, and that they want it badly. The results, roughly the reverse of what the polls were showing a month ago, would have seemed impossible even last week. The two things that were supposed to matter more than anything else in the state — organization and endorsements — counted for little. It was hard to pick which was the more unlikely outcome: that John Kerry, whose campaign only three weeks ago seemed to have crashed and burned, would win the caucuses, or that John Edwards, whose effort looked like it could never get off the ground, would come in such a close second. As for Howard Dean: When Democratic voters took a second look at him, they put aside their passion for their doubts. Early in the day, Dean had told reporters: “If we win tonight, it’s going to be very difficult to stop us.” The question now is whether the converse is true: Having lost so decisively, will it be possible for him to start again? What happened to all those new voters he was said to be bringing into politics? Does Dean have the capability that Bill Clinton and George Bush, each in their turn, proved they had — to stumble and recover and, as a result, become something larger than we thought they were?

 In other words, does he have something like what Kerry achieved on Monday night? A year ago, the Massachusetts Senator had been the presumed frontrunner, the combination of resume, money and bearing that the Democrats seemed to need. But he was other things as well: cautious, calculating and aloof. By last fall, it seemed he had squandered all his advantages. Kerry’s decision to pour so many resources into Iowa didn’t make all that much sense, given the fact that New Hampshire was the state that he needed to win most of all. But he figured early that Dean’s lead in New Hampshire had grown so large that voters there had simply stopped listening. Kerry knew he had to do something to make them pay attention again.

He’ll get that second look now. Edwards, on the other hand, had to prove there was something to him besides charisma. He worked hard, ran a classy and upbeat campaign and fashioned what many regard as the most innovative and substantive package of proposals in the race. What the first-term Senator still has to do is answer the question of whether he has the intellectual heft and vision on foreign policy that voters will demand in the post-9/11 world — the kind of test that Bush himself did not have to pass when he was running for President with little more experience in public office than Edwards has.

        The race only gets harder from here. There were, as everyone predicted, three tickets out of New Hampshire. Dick Gephardt’s political career is finished. But momentum is the most fickle friend in politics, and there are two more candidates — retired General Wesley Clark and 2000 Vice Presidential nominee Joe Lieberman — waiting for them in New Hampshire. Independents will go to the polls this time, and may constitute as much as 40% of the primary vote. And from there, the race heads South and West, into states far bigger, more diverse and complicated than either of the first two. Iowa shook up the race and threw it into the air; now we get to see where the pieces land.

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