Gail Collins bookends her humor column today with sobering solemnities. In reverse order:
On Tuesday, there will be a contest to select the preferred candidate of a small group of people who are older, wealthier and whiter than American voters in general, and more politically extreme than the average Iowa Republican.
And,
Perhaps this would be a good time to point out that the Iowa caucuses are really ridiculous.
Some might counter that general opinion has generally dismissed Iowa's ridiculousness for some time. Yet that perhaps dominant opinion is scarcely unearthed in cable news shows like "Hardball," or in the spectrum of Politico's headlines, or in the thousands of commentaries (insert mea culpa here) and comments generated daily online. On the GOP side this Midwestern spectacle of unrepresentative absurdity is covered all agog as though ... well, as though it means something penetratingly deeper than what a bevy of older, wealthier, extremist white people happen to think.
For instance last night, just to beat up on "Hardball" again, Chris Matthews sat with HuffPost's Howard Fineman and New York Magazine's John Heilemann, this threesome industriously thrashing out who's on first and what's on second and so on. Yet it occurred that Iowa's GOP caucus is rather less like an Abbott and Costello analogy than a rolling allegory of Mel Brooks's blazing dance scene, "The French Mistake": fists flying in a laughably choreographed, farcical melee which signifies little to nothing, really. This is the democracy, the republicanism, the civic elan that neoconservatives not only believe we should export, but that others, of a sadly arrested developed nature, should be interested in buying.
Predictions are as hot an item as Rick Santorum at the moment, so I'll make another -- this one, for something way down the road. In 2013, after the Republican presidential nominee has had his Iowa-contributed radicalized butt handed to him by an exceedingly wary general electorate, the smoldering GOP establishment will radically revamp this whole Iowa thing.
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