Gauged by the press coverage, the Iowa caucus vote is one of the biggest bowl games of the political football season. Heating up with the summer fairs, the presidential hopefuls from both parties blitz Iowa, trailed by the packs of press covering every pancake tossed and pig roasted. There is no question it is good political theatre. Candidates that do well can claim publicity and momentum going into the heart of the primary season. Candidates that fare poorly, particularly if in the top-tier, are likely to be all but dead by March. The argument for the Iowa caucus, along with the similar hoopla surrounding the New Hampshire primary, is that these two events force the candidates to engage the people and articulate their agenda for the next four years. The voters in these early contests amount to the political equivalent of professional taste-testers, sipping, sniffing, slurping, and spitting before rendering an expert opinion about the fitness of each candidate to lead the nation.
Perhaps it is burnout from the long hours on the road, the chill of early winter, and spending too much of the holiday season covering the events, but the press is taking serious shots at the Iowa caucuses.
An article in the LA Times covers the typically low turnout for the Iowa caucus and delivers a pointed shot at the event.
So why does small and homogeneous Iowa remain the first test of the presidential campaign season? Mostly because it wants to. And the candidates and the media have grown comfortable with the tradition -- at home in a state that is relatively easy to navigate and where political advertising comes relatively cheap.
Ease of navigation, cheap advertising, tradition, and state pride are weak arguments in favor in the high-stakes race for president. County fairs are great places to judge livestock, but may not be ideally suited for picking our choices for president. The article hits low turnout and the unrepresentative nature of caucus voters.
While California and other states wage war for the kind of candidate attention and media hype afforded this state every four years, at least 1.7 million of some 2 million eligible Iowa voters will sit out Thursday's caucuses. As usual, they will leave the decision to a contingent of political activists who are mostly older, whiter and more highly educated than the rest of the nation.
Dana Milbank in the Washington Post takes a similar swipe at the Iowa caucuses.
To paraphrase John Edwards, there are two Iowas. One is in the popular imagination, where the locals care passionately about their caucus and talk earnestly with presidential prospects in their living rooms. Then there's the actual Iowa, where most people are indifferent and a small band of the politically active act as extras in the media's stories from the heartland.
Iowans' participation in the caucuses is notorious: 6 percent of eligible voters showed up in the 2004 Democratic caucuses -- translating to about 125,000 people. If that number got much lower, voters might be outnumbered by the thousands of journalists, campaign staffers and volunteers who crowd Des Moines's hotels, flights and restaurants, reading tea leaves to divine what the small minority of Iowa voters will do on Thursday.
Milbank obviously could not resist the chance to mock Edwards and Iowa at the same time. The meat of the argument is similar to the LA Times article - precious few in Iowa cast a vote in the caucus, rendering it the providence of the political gods. And all the supporters pictured behind the candidates during the interviews are out-of-state operatives.
The event was put together by CNN. The supporters in the crowd were mostly from out of state, sent here by the campaigns at the cable network's invitation to serve as a backdrop for the live shots.
As much as I dislike Milbank and question the jealousy undercurrent in the LA Times article, there does seem to be an unfortunate kernel of truth in questioning the value of the Iowa caucus in the selection process. My personal discomfort stems from flashbacks from the Dean campaign in Iowa in 2004.
I remember sitting a room filled with dejected Deaniacs from Illinois that traveled to Iowa during that fateful January with our orange caps, Dean buttons, and determination to tell Iowans why they should vote for the good doctor. That postmortem discussion focused on three issues. (1) Did Joe Trippi bungle by putting all the resources into a make-it-or-break-it run to win Iowa? (2) Did Dean's combative relationship with the media doom the campaign to bad press going into the Iowa caucus? (3) Did we the faithful hurt the campaign with our door-to-door assault on the locals by out-of-staters? The best answer to all three is yes.
With the caucuses dominated by a small number of state political operatives, the populist has little chance going up against the establishment candidates. Trippi was wrong in assuming that Dean could break the back of the Beltway Democrats in Iowa and steamroll to victory. Beyond Dean, it is hard to argue that our party and our democracy are strengthened by a contest that favors candidates viewed as most "electable" by the national party machine. Important issues and policy positions are lost in the shuffle. Too much weight is given to the small band of loyalists that know how to game the caucus system.
Milbank has a point about how much influence the media, particularly the cable news networks, have over the perception of people in Iowa and in the rest of the country. The media cross the line from covering the news to making the news when they set up cameras in some famous Iowa watering hole, fill a few tables with out-of-state campaign volunteers, and conduct an obligatory exclusive interview with a candidate about their chances for victory in Iowa.
And yes, it is arrogant for well-intentioned volunteers to descend on Iowa like a cloud of grasshoppers to tell the people there how they should vote. The out-of-state Deaniacs wanted to participate in the political process to the fullest extent possible, but overshadowed the efforts of the Deaniacs in Iowa to convince their friends and neighbors to venture out into the January cold to participate in the caucuses.
I mourn the failure of the Dean campaign less than the issues that were central to his campaign - ending the war in Iraq, healthcare reform, strengthening public education, and fiscal responsibility. Those issues got lost in the Iowa shuffle in 2004, but are even more important today. I fear these issues will again take a backseat to the political game that has become the Iowa caucuses.
The best summary for what ails the Iowa caucuses comes from the LA Times.
The reasons that most Iowans stay away range from the practical to the philosophical to the emotional. They can't get away from jobs or responsibilities at home. They don't like politics. They don't believe their vote will make a difference. They feel oppressed by the ceaseless phone calls and television ads.