Keller @ Large: Trump's Lessons From Iowa
BOSTON (CBS) -- I've got a news bulletin for you – no one is perfect.
Everyone makes mistakes in life. The question is – can you learn from them, and avoid repeating them?
That now becomes a fairly urgent question for Donald J. Trump, who decisively lost a race in Iowa that he was expected to decisively win.
How did that happen? Nobody knows for sure, but we can speculate, and watch closely to see if Trump is doing the necessary soul-searching going forward.
The Iowa exit polling shows us that Trump didn't close well, attracting very few voters who made up their minds in the campaign's final days.
Perhaps bailing on the final Iowa debate wasn't such a good idea after all.
Those polls showed Trump fared poorly when Iowans were asked to name the candidates who "share my values." I guess Ted Cruz's attack on Trump's "New York values" was more effective than the pundits thought.
Voters do still see Trump as a political outsider and like that about him, along with his political incorrectness. But both of those traits have their downsides.
When the outsider suddenly embraces the status quo, as Trump did in defending Iowa's wasteful ethanol subsidies, he risks looking hypocritical. And flat-out calling Cruz a "liar" in the campaign's final hours may have offended some voters, as well as drawing attention to Trump's own casual relationship with the truth.
But perhaps the biggest lesson for Trump from last night is that gimmicks and show-biz are no substitute for hard work and thought.
Trump is still very much alive in this race; he may yet prosper, if he stops treating the whole enterprise as just another clever con job.
Listen to Jon's commentary:
