After Iowa, Floyd joked that the two winners were not the two newcomers but the two guys with the strangest names : Huckabee and Obama. "This" , he said, "was reason to think that Engelburt Humperdinck might come into the race."

What was more important, however, was that the three leading
Dem candidates resembled the 3 of 1968, a banner year by any standard.  Hillary Clinton was, probably to her inner dismay, Hubert Humphrey, the establishment insider. Edwards was Bobby Kennedy. OK, not a former Attorney General, but short, rich and pushing class struggle. And Obama, well, that's easy : he was Gene McCarthy : intellectually confident, moralistic,
elitist---the way only an academic can be elitist (and without showing his dibbs on the Illiad, the Aeneid, or even Mark Twain.) This is why Hillary could plow through debates with confidence : "she had been promised." This was why Barrack
had his nose in the air and his platitudes sounding almost like non-platitudes.  This was why John Edwards got a $400 haircut: certainly he didn't need it or prefer that price range. He needed to do the 2008 version of the hair-thing--- and that was no longer a rock star with hair, but an envious rich man. That was 400 bucks and a news story.  

Floyd was tuned to the reality that Republicans needed validation after having lost their way in victory : after all, Bush had become a big spender and the Republican Congress had been crazy for  earmarks. The Democrats had yet to find their path in defeat after 2004.  Floyd knew that the road to the White House lay through pride for the GOP and anger for the Democrats. The GOP needed a lighthouse; the Democrats a warning buoy. Democrats were in need to a real warship : OK, a pirate ship might do : they didn't care that much about the facts. They needed to board and conquer, not define and debate. But that was their primary, Floyd's was another.  Floyd had understood for a long time the IX Amendment to the constitution was the bedrock on which the future of the Dem Party would be built; while the X Amendment would continue as the lawful basis of GOP activities. Floyd extended his didactic activities into the other party. "The IX amendment was made for the left, for people who were determined to establish new rights in society." "The problem," he said , "with the liberals is that they don't enough respect for the constitution to read it----when all the time the constitutionality for what they want (health care) may be lying there in plane sight : number nine. It was James Madison's reconsideration : maybe in 1830 or 1880 or 1980 some new rights will need to be established. Therefore : " The enumeration in the constitution of certain rights should not be construed as to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people."  For the right, Floyd simply said "There are a lot of smart people in the country, but none of them have ever shown me just where the states surrendered their authority to the federal government to regulate reproduction. The states matter!"  That's the X Amendment.