If 'Ifs' and 'Buts' Were Candy and Nuts ...

We have the latest entry in the "what-if" contest.

(A friend of mine sent me the link to this story, and he included this observation in his e-mail: "Interesting theory."

(That's about all it is, I think. A theory.)

Hillary Clinton's former communications director apparently tells ABC News that he believes Clinton would have won the nomination if the media had come up with the goods to force John Edwards out of the race when the story of his affair was first making the tabloids late last year.

"I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," Howard Wolfson told ABC.

If you recall, Edwards edged past Clinton for second place in the Iowa caucuses way back on January 3. We don't have actual vote totals, just percentages.

And caucuses are handled differently in each state — in Iowa's Democratic caucuses, as I remember, a preliminary vote at a caucus only serves to eliminate those candidates whose support level can't reach a certain percentage in that particular caucus location.

A second vote is taken without the candidates who couldn't clear the bar — and that is the vote that is reported from that location.

Anyway, when all had been said and done, Barack Obama had 38% in Iowa, Edwards had 30% and Clinton had 29%.

There were five other candidates (Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich) who accounted for 3% as a group — I presume they were all removed from consideration in the elimination round at most of Iowa's caucus locations.

Wolfson clearly believes that Clinton would have won most of Edwards' supporters.

He has the right to believe what he wants to believe, but I don't think it's quite that cut and dried.

• Just taking the figures that we have, by removing Edwards' name, we suddenly have nearly one-third of Iowa's caucus participants who are left without a candidate.
  
  In order for Clinton to pull even with Obama, she would have to win nearly one-third of Edwards' supporters. That would still leave two-thirds of his supporters for Clinton, Obama and the other five candidates to fight over.
• Who would have won at that stage of the campaign? By most accounts, Clinton was the front-runner going into the caucus. Obama had not yet emerged as the anti-Clinton.
  
  Would Obama have outdueled Clinton for the majority of the remaining Edwards supporters?
  
  Or would one of the other Democrats — Richardson, perhaps, or Biden — have benefited from Edwards' withdrawal?
  
  See, I don't think it's a given that Edwards' withdrawal would have meant that all his supporters would automatically gravitate to any particular candidate.
  
  I also don't believe the Edwards supporters were ready for the race to be narrowed to Obama vs. Clinton at that point.
  
  If anything, I got the impression from Edwards' supporters (and I was one of them) that they were looking for a break with the past. But, like any large group, the individuals had their own ideas of what kind of break they wanted.
  
  For some Edwards supporters, Clinton would have been an acceptable alternative — as indeed she was for some former Edwards supporters in the primaries and caucuses that came after his actual withdrawal in late January.
  
  For other Edwards supporters, Clinton wasn't enough of a break with the past. Her husband was president for eight years, and she's been in the Senate for the nearly eight years since the end of his administration.
  
  Sixteen years in Washington doesn't make you an outsider.
  
  These Democrats were wary of adding to the Bush-Clinton dynastic duel that has been going on now for 20 years (longer if you include the elder Bush's eight-year president-in-training period as Ronald Reagan's sidekick).
  
  Some, if not all, of the former Edwards supporters in Iowa might have decided that neither Obama nor Clinton were satisfactory. They might have breathed new life into Richardson's campaign — or Biden's — or Dodd's.
• I am reminded of the 1992 election. At the time, I was living in Oklahoma, a rock-ribbed Republican state where Clinton ran stronger than Democrats usually do, although George H.W. Bush prevailed — as Republican nominees inevitably do in Oklahoma.
  
  Many of the Republicans with whom I spoke about the election believed that, if Ross Perot had not been in the race, Bush would have been re-elected. As you may recall, Perot finished an extremely strong third with nearly 19% of the vote nationally (that was nearly 20 million votes).
  
  Those Republicans made the same mistake Wolfson makes. They assumed that a large bloc of suddenly uncommitted voters would naturally support their candidate.
  
  But the exit polls I saw after that election were not conclusive.
  
  Exit polls of those who voted for Perot indicated that, if Perot had not been on the ballot, about 40% would have voted for Clinton, another 40% would have voted for Bush, and the remaining 20% would not have participated at all.
  
  Whether we're talking about Ross Perot in 1992 or John Edwards in 2008, the fact is that the people who supported them supported changing the status quo.
  
  In 1992, George H.W. Bush represented the status quo. It never seemed logical to me that nearly 20 million people who voted for Perot (and, as a group, adopted the rebellious "United we stand!" as their motto) would have voted to retain the status quo if Perot's name hadn't been on the ballot.
  
  It always seemed more logical to me that they would have looked for another option or they wouldn't have voted at all.
  
  I've always given Perot credit for bringing millions of Americans into the political process. I hope many of them have continued to participate.
  
  But I never bought the idea that he took more votes from the status quo candidate than he did the challenger.
  
  In 2008, Hillary Clinton represented the status quo in her party. She had been first lady for eight years. She had been in the Senate for eight years. And she was the front-runner for her party's nomination.
  
  I'm not sure she would have been the beneficiary of Edwards' withdrawal before the Iowa caucus.
  
  But neither is it certain that Obama would have been the recipient of that (pardon the expression) windfall.

Let's assume, just for a minute, that Edwards was forced out of the race in early December. No one had won anything yet. No one had momentum (the "Big Mo," as George H.W. Bush famously said) — other than whatever momentum Clinton had from the perception that she was leading the pack. Edwards' supporters would have been in a position to alter the dynamics of the race. If, as Wolfson suggests, the majority of them had piled on Clinton's bandwagon, we might be anticipating her nomination later this month. Or perhaps they would have gravitated to Obama. He might have secured the nomination earlier than he did. Or perhaps they would have opted to support someone else. They might have rallied behind Bill Richardson — would he have proven more popular among Iowa's caucus goers than Obama or Clinton? He might have, considering the political résumé he brought to the table. Or they might have lined up behind Joe Biden. His experience in foreign affairs might have seemed particularly appealing, even timely, considering the fact that Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated just a week before the Iowa caucus (and gas prices hadn't yet careened out of control). But Biden has been a part of the Washington establishment for more than 30 years. He might have been seen as too much of a status quo candidate. And that doesn't even consider the possibility that another Democrat — perhaps a prominent one, like recent nominees John Kerry or Al Gore — might have decided to enter the race. Gore, who won the popular vote as the Democrats' 2000 nominee and won the Nobel Prize last year for his efforts against global warming, seems like a particularly plausible prospect. But both Gore and Kerry might have been seen as too entrenched in the establishment — even though Gore has held no elective office since leaving the vice presidency. And a movement to persuade Gore to run was launched by supporters in October. If Edwards had withdrawn before the Iowa caucus, that might have been the nudge Gore needed to try again. To me, this is another example of the truth of the old adage, "Timing is everything." It's a what-if that can't be resolved. And it's pointless, at this stage, to try. My gut feeling is that Clinton wasn't going to win in Iowa. And Jon Cohen appears to agree with me in a Washington Post blog entry. "It is a pure hypothetical, of course, and the entire dynamics of the contest would have been different without Edwards," writes Cohen. "But the public data do not bolster the notion that Clinton would have won." Want some facts?

1. Obama will be nominated later this month. He will give his acceptance speech on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
2. Hillary Clinton will speak at the convention. She will address the delegates about a week after the 88th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in the United States.
3. It seems doubtful to me that she will be chosen to be his running mate.

That's reality.