Rasmussen Poll Shows Indecision of Iowa Republicans (ContributorNetwork)

COMMENTARY | Rasmussen has released a poll that has further muddied the waters in the less than two weeks leading to the Iowa caucus. It places Mitt Romney in the lead at 25 percent, with Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich trailing at 20 percent and 17 percent.

A couple of days ago, a PPP poll put Paul in the lead at 23 percent, with Romney and Gingrich trailing at 20 percent and 14 percent. A recent Gallup Poll has Gingrich still in the lead.

If anything the flurry of polls that show the top three candidates changing positions on an almost daily basis shows that the electorate in Iowa is still largely undecided whom they intend to vote for. The reason for this indecision is not hard to understand.

Romney is calm, telegenic and in style at least the very personification of what a president of the U.S. should be. Unfortunately, Romney's conservative credentials, which a Republican must have to garner enthusiasm, are suspect. His main claim to fame is the passage of a health care reform law when he was governor of Massachusetts that served as a model for President Barack Obama's version of health care reform.

Gingrich has been the font of cutting edge conservative ideas for decades. As Speaker of the House in the mid-1990s he accomplished some items on the conservative agenda, including balancing the budget, welfare reform, a capital gains tax cut and protecting the Internet from over regulation.

But Gingrich is known for saying things such as attacking Romney for his capitalist endeavors as a CEO of an investment company that have proven to be off putting. He has also strayed from time to time from conservative orthodoxy such as in the infamous couch commercial with Nancy Pelosi on climate change.

Paul is a deficit hawk on steroids. He proposes to cut $1 trillion from the federal budget in his first year in office. But his foreign policy views, especially about Iran and nuclear weapons, deeply frighten many voters. There is also the issue of some frankly racist articles that were published in his newsletters in the 1990s.

Oddly, the other, more conventionally conservative candidates, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann still lag behind, splitting up the conservative vote. This points to a muddied outcome in the Iowa caucus.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20111221/pl_ac/10730753_rasmussen_poll_shows_indecision_of_iowa_republicans

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