Around noon on Thursday, about twelve hours before Dean's recent Iowa caucus dis came out, I was talking with my father over the phone. He asked what day Iowa the caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries took place. I told him the dates, and then I told him about the states on February 3rd, including Delaware, which I will be making trips to on behalf of Dean.
When I told him about Delaware, he said, in all seriousness, "great, another small state telling us who the next president will be." I mentioned to him that a few days earlier I had totaled the populations of the first nine primary / caucus states and the District of Columbia and discovered that, combined, they had about 75% the population of California. We then joked for the next minute or so about how the first several states contained such major metropolitan centers, and how they were such an accurate reflection of the country as a whole.
Now, my father and I are from upstate New York, so this conversation may come off to some as ethnocentric, big state arrogance. However, although I have nothing but anecdotal evidence to support this claim, I feel it is representative of a nationwide frustration at the nearly totalitarian amount of control Iowa and New Hampshire hold over American politics. To put it as kindly as I can, no matter how much I hear people extol the virtues of retail politics and the boost the two early states can give to poorly funded campaigns, the grip that Iowa and New Hampshire maintain over American politics is profoundly exclusionary, reactionary, chauvinist, and in direct opposition to all modern traditions of participatory democracy.
As I already mentioned, whenever a discussion about why people in Iowa and New Hampshire should always be the first to decide on presidential candidates, many old reasons are given. First, we often here the anti-urban reason: retail politics are more democratic than rally politics. Next, we hear about the superior democratic impulses of Iowans and New Hampshirites: supposedly residents of those two states pay more attention to politics and take their civic duty more seriously than the plebs in other states (certainly the thousands of visits and tens of millions of dollars spent in those two elections have no bearing on this "fact"). Then, if those don't work, we hear reactionary arguments: it's always been this way, so why change it now? However, no matter what crap reasons are given, the real reason the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries remain first in the nation is because, like all minority ruling elites in history, the people who control them (and, in through that control, also have a stranglehold over the presidency) simply do not want to surrender their unjustifiable, wildly disproportionate hold on power. It's the same reason the electoral college has never been abolished: the anti-Democratic power the Senate grants to smaller states allow the will of 4,000,000 people in Wyoming, the Dakotas, Alaska, Vermont, Delaware and Montana (more than 90% of whom are white), a veto over the will of the 130,000,000 people in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio (around 60% of whom are white).
In fact, when the two early states are compared, the system in Iowa is actually far worse. In 2000, fewer than 90,000 Iowans participated in the Republican and Democratic caucuses combined, around 3% of the state's voting age population. Hell, exactly 2,001 people participated in the Democratic caucuses, less than one third of one-percent of the people who voted for Gore in the general election. The caucus "voting" structure is designed much in the same way the poll tax and literacy requirements in the Jim Crow south kept blacks and poor whites from voting for nearly 100 years. Instead of expanding access to voting, they make it as difficult to vote as possible, and thus make voting the luxury of those who can afford to take off work or find a babysitter for several hours.
By calling the Iowa caucuses for what they really are, and by finally being the candidate who voices what most Americans really think of the Iowa caucuses, Dean may have found his "Sistah Souljah" moment (even though I have always hated that term). If he does the right thing and doesn't try to completely retract his former position, he will present himself as a candidate who is finally willing to take on yet another of America's archaic, pseudo-Democratic institutions that, like the electoral college, should have been abolished 150 years ago. The fact is that small groups of Iowans have already constructed a system designed to lower political participation as much as possible in their own state and now they do not want to surrender their wildly disproportionate power over the rest of the nation. Well, boo-hoo if they don't like it when someone calls them on it. Christ, I live in Philadelphia, and in order to have a voice in the election I have to drive to Delaware on the weekends and canvass for my candidate.
Instead of retracting his former position, Dean should say that while the values of Iowans are the values of Americans, the caucus voting system is not. Instead of apologizing for his remarks, he should say that one value both Iowans and Americans share is equality, and that it is time for Iowans to allow all Americans an equal say in choosing their next president. Instead of apologizing, Dean should call for sweeping electoral reform. In so doing, I promise you that even if Iowa hates him for it, America will love him.