Why I Hate Iowa

His biggest pitch to supporters: Be sure to vote, and get others out there with you. "Call your friends," Romney said. "Get 'em out to the caucuses and make that difference. People are going to be listening to what Iowa has to say."

"I'd like to win them," Romney said of the early contests in Iowa and next week in New Hampshire. "But if I don't win, coming in second in these states is a strong statement."

Former senator John Edwards, D-N.C., capping a 36-hour marathon campaign swing, shifted from his stump speech attacking corporate power to urging his supporters to turn out at the caucuses.

Source for above lines

Iowa, Iowa, Iowa.

Can someone remind the candidates and the press that these people are running for the President of the United States and not President of Iowa?

In several hours, we will know the results of the Iowa caucuses, kicking off the first official votes towards selecting presidential nominees this year. In several hours, we will hear from our Iowan overlords who to vote for President.

"Altogether, 120,000 to 150,000 people are expected to come to the Democratic caucuses and 80,000 to 90,000 to the GOP meetings." (USA Today)

More people turn out for some of the contests in New York City than will show up to vote for Presidential nominees tonight in Iowa. And yet, somehow they set the tone for the rest of that. While other states wanted to get in on the action, people in Iowa (and New Hampshire) bitterly complained, as if this was their birthright. And all the meanwhile, candidates looking for national office pander to Iowans for months, up to a year or more.

Aren't the candidates looking to be President of a country "from sea to shining sea," not "from Dubuque to Sioux City," or was I wrong?

The candidates have camped out, even moved their families in with them, for most of the past year and especially the past several months. They may be able to qualify to run for Governor of Iowa, if they really want to stay there that long.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (R) dared to briefly go to Los Angeles to tape an episode of "The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno.

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (R) attacked Huckabee for having the sheer audacity to go to any place out in the other 49 states of the Union!

“Frankly my focus is on the caucuses here in Iowa,” Romney said at a press conference at a middle school here, as he was flanked by about 50 mostly younger supporters. “I think Mike is more concerned about the caucus in Los Angeles.”

- Scott Conroy on the CBS blog "From the Road"

The horror! How dare he disrupt the birthright of Iowa, granted to it by God Himself! That's not America!

Beyond that, the campaigns are providing luxurious services at great cost to their campaigns to entice more Iowans to vote. Everything from car rides to baby-sitting to food, these Iowans get perks nobody else in the nation enjoys just for going to their caucus location. Will a person in New York with two jobs or children to look after be able to get such services in order to go vote in the primary on February 5th? Only perhaps if local organizations provide it. But that won't be money spent from presidential campaign coffers.

The people in Iowa and New Hampshire demand the candidates camp out in their states as if nothing else in this nation of three hundred million matters. They demand that the candidates meet them face-to-face in restaurants, house parties, schools, and more to talk about "Iowan values," as if they're something separate from those in the states surrounding Iowa. What do the rest of us get out of the candidates? Nothing more than an ad or two. If we even want to see them live and in the flesh, we may have to find a rally, but we won't be able to get within the two feet of space that an Iowan can. Can this really be the best way to select presidential candidates?

Luckily there are a few out there that really do see this strange world as a problem. Reuters reports on some of the editorials that call out this bizarre process as just that, bizarre.

Jeff Greenfield, political correspondent for CBS News, wrote in the online magazine Slate.com that the caucuses, in which Iowans gather to discuss and vote for their party's candidate in the November 2008 election, "violate some of the most elemental values of a vibrant and open political process" - the secret ballot and the principle of one person, one vote.

In the Wall Street Journal, Iowa resident and freelance journalist Michael Judge complained that the caucuses encouraged candidates to pander to Iowans, 90 percent of whom were unlikely to show up at caucuses.

"Even if you're a died-in-the-wool (sic) Democrat or Republican, you have to be a certain kind of person to do the caucus thing," he wrote.

The caucuses kick off the state-by-state process by which Democrats and Republicans will select their nominees to face off in the November presidential election. Fewer than 250,000 people are expected to take part in the voting on Thursday.

The winners can expect a tremendous wave of publicity and flood of contributions that can boost their campaigns for the next, crucial stage of the nomination battles.

Those who do badly could be out of the race within days. Both major parties' nominees are expected to be selected by mid-February.

(One note about caucuses: There is no absentee option. So if you're working, have to be elsewhere, have to care for someone, or are in the armed forces deployed elsewhere, too bad. You don't get to have a voice.)

Reuters also reports on a common Iowan rebuttal to all those nasty people wanting to have a crack at their birthright:

Defenders of Iowa say the state's citizens take their role in winnowing the presidential field extremely seriously and force the candidates to do on-the-ground, personal campaigning instead of relying on television advertisements.

"Sorry, but that's not good enough," the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in an editorial. It noted that the state's largest city of Des Moines had a population less than half the size of Oakland, California.

"The system favors enthusiasts with the time to attend a caucus for several hours, a process that screens out those with family duties, conflicting work hours, travel plans or disabilities," the newspaper wrote.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins agreed:

"The identity of the next leader of the most powerful nation in the world is not supposed to depend on the opinion of one small state. Let alone the sliver of that state with the leisure and physical capacity to make a personal appearance tonight at a local caucus that begins at precisely 7 o'clock. Let alone the tiny slice of the small sliver willing to take part in a process that involves standing up in public to show a political preference, while being lobbied and nagged by neighbors."

Washington Post columnist David Broder joined the attack, saying the peculiar procedures in Iowa favored conservative Christian and anti-abortion groups among Republicans and organized labor among Democrats who were best organized and able to get their members to the caucuses.

The result, he wrote, was "a double distortion mirror."

In other words, their defense is that they take their choices seriously, not like the rest of those people elsewhere in the country. Additionally, those candidates only do face-to-face campaigning with people in Iowa and New Hampshire. It can't happen anywhere else because no other place gets to host the candidates for twelve months prior to the vote. So what good is it if candidates do everything possible to get a few thousand Iowans to vote at the expense of millions elsewhere?

Is this jealousy? You bet it is. Having to watch the candidates essentially all become Iowan residents for the year prior to voting in the primaries are justifiable grounds for jealousy. There is no sensible reason why Iowa (and New Hampshire for that matter) must always be the grand filter for the rest of us. Sure, many people would love to have the politicians as far away from them as possible. Yet when it comes to making sure we elect whom we want, having them in some of the other places in this great country would be beneficial. Besides, it's not as if our fantastic filters in Iowa and New Hampshire have given us the best choices.

The results of the caucuses tonight will be, as always, interesting. But they shouldn't be a cue to the rest of us that these are the picks. We must utilize our own power at subsequent primaries and caucuses to inject our own voice into the process. At the end of the day, all Iowans will have done is send a few delegates to the national conventions this summer. That's it. The rest belong to the rest of us. We have to take them back.