The NY Times reports on the 2015 exercise in GOP madness known as the Iowa Caucuses. The fact that their prime promoter is Iowa Congressman Steve King, is a good indicator of just how seriously warped the party's ideology has become and how far-right forces have so fully captured its heart.
Unfortunately the evidence of this in the Times piece is scattered, so let me reorganize the salient points as follows (below the orange whirly doo):
First....who is on the schedule?:
Those on the schedule include two former governors, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and Rick Perry of Texas; Senator Ted Cruz of Texas; Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin; former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania; and Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon.
And the big gun on the program, proving just how much in thrall candidates are to the craziest among them, is NJ Governor Chris Christie. And the podium will be awash with the usual detritus of the party:
Also scheduled to give speeches are Sarah Palin; Donald Trump; Newt Gingrich; Jim DeMint, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation and a former senator from South Carolina; and Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who gave the Republican response to the president’s State of the Union address on Tuesday.
Next, who will be attending?:
A crowd of roughly 1,250 from around Iowa will be in the audience....
And what is the likely composition of this group of state GOP stalwarts?:
In 2012, nearly 60 percent of Republican caucusgoers in Iowa were born-again or evangelical Christians.
And yet this collection of a thousand or so attendees from the rightest of the right wing of a mid-west farm state, will have the media fawning over every word spoken and trying to pick out the early "leader" in the presidential "horse race." Congressman King may be a dangerous idealogue, but he is no dummy:
Mr. King said he frequently reminded Iowans that they had outsize influence and that rallying behind certain issues forced candidates to conform their views. “We can shape them, we can hone them and we can bolt that platform down,” he said.
(One might ask Rep. King just how he wants us to read the word "bolt") But bottom line, Mr. King is one of the major reasons "his" party is pressing to pass ever more Draconian anti-abortion bills, jam prayer into schools and a return to the gold standard.
Eventually, we'll have that other Iowa exercise in faux democracy, the Straw Polls, at which the candidates seek to win by rounding up as many of the party faithful attending as they can. They generally do so by giving delegates free food and goody bags and the winners often wind up spending hundreds of dollars per "vote" in the effort to score a "victory." (Charlie Pierce nailed it when he said that being able to win the Straw Poll is a better indicator of a candidate's ability to organize a senior citizen bus trip to Atlantic City.)
As a measure of just how successful this whole exercise has been, note that recent winners of the "Poll" have been Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann and Mitt Romney.
And when all is said and done, both of these exercises have a primary underlying goal....to raise money for the Iowa Republican party......not to help the national party identify a candidate who can actually win a Presidential election.
Keep up the good work Cong. King. We're rooting for you!!! Your success so far is really inspiring and the end results are clearly good news......for Democrats.