Election 2012: 'Heinously late post-Caucus thoughts'

Tomorrow is the big day and with a little downtime I plan to post a couple pre-election thoughts. I downloaded the sample ballot for my polling place a couple weeks ago and wanted to write “endorsements” regarding each race. Though those well-laid intentions fell to the wayside, I still want to write one combined endorsement post before tomorrow.

But first this, an unfinished post from way back in January (the document, “Heinously late post-Caucus thoughts.doc,” has been sitting on my desktop, along with the pic at the top, since then):

After months of listening to what was essentially the same story on Iowa Public Radio — “[Politician’s name] met supporters in [town name] at [probably a Pizza Ranch] and told them [broken-record rhetoric beginning with ‘This president’]; local yokel said [boastful remark]” — I now know how Phil Connors felt every morning when he woke to “I Got You Babe.”

But wait… You hear that? Nothing. Crickets (if there were any in January). The remaining Red Republicrat presidential candidates have headed east and taken their annoying ads with them. Good riddance.

No, I did not participate in last Tuesday’s Iowa Caucus. Bobblehead did and his account of it is here. I vaguely understand how the caucus works, but after reading Bobblehead’s post I could not help feeling impressed: it sounded like grassroots democracy. Whether or not it is a model for community decision-making is another thing, but

And that is it. I cannot remember exactly what I wanted to say but was probably going to write about the Caucus being an exercise in local, community-based, grassroots democracy. Which is sexy stuff in my opinion.

Actually, I just remembered what I was writing about: is our state-by-state process of vetting Presidential candidates — collecting delegates for a winner-take-all race as hopefuls gradually drop out, leaving fewer choices for voters in later primaries — serving us well?

It is something I have wondered for a long time. I am obviously not a Republicrat, but to me it seems painfully pointless and hypocritical to have eight or nine (or however many) candidates bicker and fight amongst themselves for months before they all, in turn, endorse and actively support the one person who survives the process. (“Wait. Weren’t you talking shit about that same person just a few weeks ago?”) Though I know nothing about the origins and reasoning behind our current primary process, I also think it disenfranchises many voters.

Much is made of Iowa’s “first in the nation” status — so much, in fact, a poor performance here dooms Presidential hopes for a number of candidates. Case in point: Tim Pawlenty. According to T-Paw’s Wikipedia page, he officially threw his name in the hat for the red Republicrat Presidential nomination on May 23, 2011. Less than three months later, the day after finishing third at the Ames Straw Poll — an unofficial poll where only 16,892 votes were cast — he withdrew from the race. (Very premature, if you ask me, especially since every candidate in the race rode a surge of support at one point. The relevance of the Ames Straw Poll also appears quite dubious: the winner of the Ames Straw Poll, Michele Bachmann, finished sixth in the Iowa caucus and suspended her campaign the next day. Mitt Romney, the eventual nominate, received just 567 votes. Interestingly, Gary Busey — yes, that Gary Busey — received seventy-seven votes.) In September 2011, Pawlenty endorsed Mitt Romney.

Believe it or not, Pawlenty had supporters in other states. Or at least one, who voiced his displeasure in a letter to (I think) the DMR. Why, he wondered, is Iowa so important that even an unofficial poll will derail campaigns and negate support elsewhere in the country? I wonder the same thing.

Basically, there is a much better way to do this. The very long and drawn out process of primaries, nominations, and campaigning (which, amazingly, has been dragging on since early-2011) is not serving us well. It is the tip of a massive iceberg of dysfunction and ineffectiveness that, in the long run, only annoys and engenders political apathy.