The Freakin’ Deacon is bad-mouthin’ Iowa

As you might surmise from my frequent links to it, Powerlineblog is one of my daily must-reads. Now, however, it - or at least Paul – has gone too far. He wants to wreck the Iowa caucuses.

I find it offensive to think that 75,000 Iowans (or whatever the number is), a disproportionate number of whom have nothing to do for several hours on a week night, get to play a major role in the nomination process. Actually, I doubt that they play such a role – in my view the Iowa caucuses are vastly overrated. However, it’s generally thought that the caucuses are important, and that perception alone is enough to distort the process.

I am sick and tired of people from media centers like NYC and DC bitching about how Iowa – admittedly a lousy place to spend the month of January, which I think is their real problem – shouldn’t have so much influence in the presidential nominating process. We Iowans pay a stiff price for our First in the Nation status and we ought to get some credit for it.

We put up with endless political commercials on TV for months and months. We accept, or we dodge, phone calls from candidates or opinion surveys on a daily basis. We suffer mailboxes full of political propaganda and requests for contributions so that the candidates can send out more propaganda. We take the time to go to townhall meetings and rallies to hear and evaluate the candidates. We ask questions and challenge the candidates in ways that the media doesn’t have the nerve to.

When candidates campaign in BIG states, they do it exclusively by TV ads and telephone push-polls; they don’t get the face to face meetings with regular people that can reveal their fatal flaws. And as for the debates – a bunch of soft-balls lobbed up by sycophantic TV newsdorks with no follow-up questions allowed – fuggetaboudit.

Sometimes, our questions even expose a presidential pretender:

Supporters of former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, aka "Deanie-boppers," accuse the media of piling on by repeatedly playing his now infamous Iowa caucus "concession speech," punctuated by his banshee-like "Yeeeaaaaaarggh!"
[…]
Or maybe it started when an Iowa retiree asked Dean to stop "mean-mouthing" President Bush, insisting that Dean and other Democratic candidates divide the country with their Bush-bashing, rather than outlining their own plans and showing respect for authority. The elderly man told the former governor: "You should help your neighbor and not tear him down." "George Bush is not my neighbor," Dean replied. "Yes, he is," the retiree said, at which point Dean blew up: "You sit down! You've had your say . . . " Dean proceeded to "mean-mouth" Bush while going off on the "harm" committed by the president. The candidate explained, "It's not time to put up -- any of this 'love thy neighbor' stuff."

In fact, while we Iowans have not been able to separate all the husk from the corn, so to speak, the nation might have been better served to have listened to us in years like 1976 when “uncommitted” beat Jimmy Carter 37% to 28%, or in 1992 when Bill Clinton got only 3% of the Democrat caucus support.

So let’s have a little more respect for Iowa and the price we pay to be the first step in the nomination process.