The NY Times Magazine's Mark Leibovich hilariously ponders the "homage [that] must be paid" by Republican hopefuls to Iowa's governor, Terry Branstad:
If there’s one thing every Republican presidential candidate can agree upon, it is that Branstad represents the peak of American leadership, if not the pinnacle of all human achievement.
Though comical in his assessment, Leibovich is rather unhappy about politicos' Iowa schmoozing. "It would be one thing if all of this early activity and attention in Iowa resulted in a smarter electorate, better candidates or a more authentic version of democracy," he writes. But instead it's a perpetuation of an unrepresentative, narrow, secluded, insider's circus: an importuning candidate, a favor-granting governor, and the "discerning voter" who, W.-like, believes he or she can read the candidate's soul from a "Hi" and a handshake. In short, it's pigshit--the wildly malodorous goo of America's presidential-selection process.
And God help me, I love it. I know I'm not supposed to. I'm supposed to brood and lament the shallowness of it all, to think deeply depressed thoughts about the unrealized promise of an informed electorate weighing the relative values of thoughtful, miscellaneous statesmen. But I'm a political realist, and I know pigshit is a marvelously slick ointment for the wheels of democracy. In fact I find the prospect of a shifty Chris Christie tangling incoherently with a slithering Ted Cruz on some Des Moines, pre-caucus stage an exhilarating one. To me, the coming buffoonery only reinforces all those assorted maxims about the precariousness of representative democracy.
Republicans' Iowa caucus won't be so much a selection process as a warning. These, believe it or not, are the best the party has. And Democrats will follow suit. Dark, and funny, times. Let's do get on with them.