Golly, I'm as giddy as a schoolgirl.
Here we are, on the eve of the cornfield caucuses, in which a couple hundred thousand middle-aged white folks -- large segments of whom are still undecided after 18 months of candidates' appearances, personal visits, phone calls, emails, flyers, broadcast ads, newspaper editorials, endorsements, etc., etc., etc. -- choose the next president for all 300 million of us.
Well, they do not, of course, actually choose the next president, but their role is as close to an exclusionary bubble as any nominating process can get; the consequences range from the hugely influential to the damn-near dictatorial.
It's enough to make the old smoke-filled rooms -- Democratic party bosses and labor racketeers in one, Republican party bosses and corporate racketeers in another -- look democratic. And their more direct results, one must admit, were often more appealing as well, from Abraham Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt to distant cousin Franklin.
Iowa gives us George Bushes.
But, as political philosopher Donald Rumsfeld once told us in the course of proving it, democracy is a messy thing. We go to nominating war with the system we have, not the system we need or want.
Still, as an excellent NYT piece points out this morning, Iowa's famed, quasi-democratic caucus system is even less quasi-democratic than the rest of us who must abide by its results might prefer. As a purported cross-section sampling of Middle America, demographically and democratically speaking, it comes up way short. It is, in fact, a troubled bubble of contradiction and democracy denied.
As a New York University election expert put it, "Just as nonrepresentative as Iowa is of the country, Iowa caucusgoers are nonrepresentative of Iowa as a whole." And the reason is simple.
For many, attending a caucus is an intolerable, time-consuming commitment, one beginning early in the evening and extending, not uncommonly, until the wee and exhausted hours of the following morning. This seemingly endless, needlessly bureaucratic gallimaufry is especially true of the Democratic caucuses, which should come as no surprise. Republicans are tidier, organized and businesslike: "voters can leave shortly after they declare their preferences."
But while the image of participatory, town-hall democracy in action looms large, the reality is quite different. Because the must-attend caucus system (absentee voting isn't permitted) "tend[s] to leave out nearly entire categories of voters: the infirm, soldiers on active duty, medical personnel who cannot leave their patients, parents who do not have baby sitters, restaurant employees on the dinner shift, and many others who work in retail, at gas stations and in other jobs that require evening duty."
The result, of course, is precisely what our election-law expert said it was -- a nonrepresentative slice of a nonrepresentative slice of a small, largely agricultural state of mostly comfortable whites with the freedom of bankers' hours in a vast, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse and mostly urban nation. And from this slice will come a virtual dictate of the subsequent ordeal in the next, small, primary state.
The reasons border on the abstruse, but suffice it to say, as the NYT did, that "to preserve their early voting opportunities, Iowa party leaders must defend a system that excludes many of the state’s people from voting."
Jacksonian democracy my ass. Even with exclusionary property requirements, insidious poll taxes and corrupt party bosses we got giants from time to time. Today's "refined" system reminds me of that classic line from "The Odd Couple," in which one of the poker-playing regulars, following Felix's rampant disinfecting and sterilizing, said, as best I can recall, It was better before ... It was better with the green bologna and molded cheese and smelly cigars.
And before someone writes to castigate me for advocating a return to poll taxes, chill out. I'm only saying there has to be a better way -- a far more representative, democratic way.