Iowa Caucuses Are As Distorted As A Funhouse Mirror
When the Iowa caucus results trickle in Tuesday night, the usual rules of mathematics may be suspended.
In normal elections, the candidate who garners the most votes is the undisputed winner. But the caucuses are anything but normal.
Instead, the raw totals will be put through a Cuisinart of spin and obfuscation as the campaigns, the operatives, and the pundits try to whip up their desired electoral concoction.
All this unfolds against the backdrop of an expectations game that isn’t unlike the Wall Street casino, where beating the analysts’ consensus each quarter is more important than earnings per share.
Take Mitt Romney, surely the most maligned front-runner of modern times. The former governor spent the year fostering the notion that he wasn’t really playing in Iowa, where he got trounced in 2008, but had to abandon that charade when Newt Gingrich started coming on strong. That’s why Romney spent New Year’s weekend racing through the cornfields.
If Romney prevails at the caucuses, he is the undisputed winner, gets a slingshot into New Hampshire, the quasi-home state where he’s already favored, and could all but wrap this thing up within a week.
But if Romney finishes second, he could still be declared the winner—that is, if Ron Paul finishes first. The logic is that nobody outside the congressman’s inner circle sees him as a serious threat to win the Republican nomination. So a Paul victory will be immediately discounted by the press as a fluke—but good news for Romney because it prevents a more viable rival such as Gingrich from getting an Iowa bounce. Paul, meanwhile, loses by winning. Got that?
Rick Santorum was virtually ignored by the media until he blipped up to 15 or 16 percent in three polls last week and triggered the promiscuous use of the S-word, surge. Suddenly he was everywhere, including the Today show. If Santorum finishes third, he will be crowned a winner simply because he had been so far back in the pack.
For Newt, the situation is reversed. Six weeks ago, the media would have treated word that he might place third in the caucuses as a stunning comeback, given that the former speaker was widely written off after his campaign imploded last summer. Then Gingrich rocketed into first place in the polls and expectations soared; he might actually win Iowa! Romney would be mortally wounded! Uh, not so fast. That was before a super PAC with close ties to Romney unleashed a barrage of nearly $3 million in anti-Newt attack ads, which amounted to nearly half of all political commercials aired in the Hawkeye State.
Suddenly, Gingrich was saying he’d be happy to finish in the top four, and his campaign manager said fifth place would be just fine—not a particularly effective attempt to move the goalposts. If Gingrich does somehow make it to the top three, he can do a victory dance.
(Think this stuff doesn’t matter? Bill Clinton effectively won the 1992 New Hampshire primary by declaring himself the “Comeback Kid,” even though he finished second, because he clawed his way back from womanizing and draft-dodging allegations. But the trick got old. When Joe Lieberman in 2004 exulted over being in “a three-way split decision for third place,” despite being mired in single digits in New Hampshire, everyone scoffed.)
Finishing out of the “top tier,” as defined by the media-politico complex, would be bad news for Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, both of whom briefly led the Iowa polls. Every time they turn around, reporters will be asking whether they plan to drop out. In such an environment, fundraising tends to dry up, a vicious cycle that forces most candidates to the sidelines.
To underscore the absurdity of the process further, 119,000 Republicans turned out four years ago, so these distinctions about who grabbed a ticket out of Iowa and who didn’t often turn on one candidate pulling a thousand votes more than the next one. And these aren’t just ordinary voters, but people willing to sit through a community meeting at 7 p.m. on a cold January night. What’s more, no delegates are awarded on caucus night, which simply starts a long and complicated process.
Why, then, does Iowa—a state far whiter and more rural than most of America—get to play such an outsize role? Well, it performs more of a winnowing function in GOP contests, where the evangelical vote can be as high as 40 percent. Mike Huckabee went nowhere after winning the caucuses in 2008, while John McCain, who finished fourth, wound up as the nominee. Iowa is in some ways a funhouse mirror, distorting the process as everyone else suspends disbelief and plays along.
State officials, such as Gov. Terry Branstad, tell me Iowa deserves its kickoff spot because the well-informed citizenry peppers the candidates with tough questions. But even they had to admit there was far less of that this year, when the candidates spent much of their time in TV studios and at network-sponsored debates rather than pressing the flesh in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.
If Santorum finishes strongly—and he’s largely escaped media scrutiny because his rise began in the final week—it will partially vindicate the old-fashioned shoe-leather approach. He conducted more than 300 events in the state. Now he’s talking about making a stand in New Hampshire, knowing full well the way the press scores these things. “We just have to exceed expectations, which right now are pretty low,” Santorum told Politico.
But that in turn depends on whether Santorum’s Iowa vote is deemed better than expected, worse than expected, or somewhere in the muddled middle. Within a day or two the press will be obsessing about New Hampshire, and except for those left behind as roadkill, Iowa may well prove not to have mattered very much.
By: Howard Kurtz, The Daily Beast, January 2, 2012
How Ron Paul’s Libertarian Principles Support Racism
The furor over the racist newsletters published by Ron Paul in the nineties is, in some ways, more revealing than the newsletters themselves. In a series of responses by Paul and his supporters ranging from anguished essays to angry dismissals to crazed conspiracy diagrams (check out page seven), the basic shape of the Paul response has emerged. Paul argues that he was completely unaware that, for many years, the newsletter purporting to express his worldview consistently expressed vicious racism.
This is wildly implausible, but let’s grant the premise, because it sets up the more interesting argument. Paul’s admirers have tried to paint the racist newsletters as largely separate from his broader worldview, an ungainly appendage that could be easily removed without substantially altering the rest. Tim Carney argues:
Paul’s indiscretions — such as abiding 9/11 conspiracy theorists and allowing racist material in a newsletter published under his name — will be blown up to paint a scary caricature. His belief in state’s rights and property rights will be distorted into support for Jim Crow and racism.
The stronger version of this argument, advanced by Paul himself, is that racism is not irrelevant to his ideology, but that his ideology absolves him of racism. “Libertarians are incapable of being racist,” he has said, “because racism is a collectivist idea, you see people in groups.” Most libertarians may not take the argument quite as far as Paul does – many probably acknowledge that it is possible for a libertarian to hold racist views – but it does help explain their belief that racism simply has no relation to the rest of Paul’s beliefs. They genuinely see racism as a belief system that expresses itself only in the form of coercive government power. In Paul’s world, state-enforced discrimination is the only kind of discrimination. A libertarian by definition opposes discrimination because libertarians oppose the state. He cannot imagine social power exerting itself through any other form.
You can see this premise at work in Paul’s statements about civil rights. In a 2004 statement condemning the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Paul laid out his doctrinaire libertarian opposition. “[T]he forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty,” he wrote. “The federal government has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of private property owners to use their property as they please and to form (or not form) contracts with terms mutually agreeable to all parties.”
Paul views every individual as completely autonomous, and he is incapable of imagining any force other than government power that could infringe upon their actual liberty. White people won’t hire you? Then go form a contract with somebody else. Government intervention can only make things worse.
The same holds true of Paul’s view of sexual harassment. In his 1987 book, he wrote that women who suffer sexual harassment should simply go work somewhere else: “Employee rights are said to be valid when employers pressure employees into sexual activity. Why don’t they quit once the so-called harassment starts?” This reaction also colored his son Rand Paul’s response to sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain, which was to rally around Cain and grouse that he can’t even tell jokes around women any more.
This is an analysis that makes sense only within the airtight confines of libertarian doctrine. It dissipates with even the slightest whiff of exposure to external reality. The entire premise rests upon ignoring the social power that dominant social groups are able to wield outside of the channels of the state. Yet in the absence of government protection, white males, acting solely through their exercise of freedom of contract and association, have historically proven quite capable of erecting what any sane observer would recognize as actual impediments to the freedom of minorities and women.
The most fevered opponents of civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s – and, for that matter, the most fervent defenders of slavery a century before – also usually made their case in in process terms rather than racist ones. They stood for the rights of the individual, or the rights of the states, against the federal Goliath. I am sure Paul’s motives derive from ideological fervor rather than a conscious desire to oppress minorities. But the relationship between the abstract principles of his worldview and the ugly racism with which it has so frequently been expressed is hardly coincidental.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, January 2, 2012
New Year’s Resolutions: New Rules For The New Year
NEW YEAR’S resolutions are the original New Rules. Except that resolutions are usually self-oriented: I am going to lose weight this year. My New Year’s resolution, by the way, is to do the ones from ’75; I made a lot of good ones that year. I was 19, and thought I could polish them off by age 20. Alas, I’m a little behind.
Also, New Rules are bigger, broader and grander. I don’t tell you what I’m going to eat; I tell you how the world should work. Here’s what 2011 prompts me to decree for 2012:
New Rule Now that we have no money, and all our soldiers have come home from Iraq and they’ve all got experience building infrastructure, and no jobs … we must immediately solve all of our problems by declaring war on the United States.
New Rule If you were a Republican in 2011, and you liked Donald Trump, and then you liked Michele Bachmann, and then you liked Rick Perry, and then you liked Herman Cain, and then you liked Newt Gingrich … you can still hate Mitt Romney, but you can’t say it’s because he’s always changing his mind.
New Rule Starting next year, any politician caught in a scandal can’t go before the press, offer a lame excuse and then say, “Period. End of Story.” Here’s how you indicate a “period” and the end of a story: shut up.
New Rule The press must stop saying that each debate is “make or break” for Rick Perry and call them what they really are: “break.”
New Rule You can’t be against same-sex marriage and for Newt Gingrich. No man has ever loved another man as much as Newt Gingrich loves Newt Gingrich.
New Rule Internet headlines have to be more like newspaper headlines. That means they have to tell me something instead of just tricking me into clicking on them. If you write the headline, “She Wore That?” you have to go to your journalism school and give your degree back.
New Rule Let’s stop scheduling the presidential election in the same year as the Summer Olympics. I get so exhausted watching those robotic, emotionally stunted, artificial-looking creatures with no real lives striving to do the one thing they’re trained to do that I barely have energy left to watch the Olympics.
New Rule No more holiday-themed movies with a cast of thousands unless at least half of them get killed by a natural disaster. Fair’s fair — if I have to watch Katherine Heigl and Zac Efron as singles who can’t find love, I also get to see them swallowed up by the earth.
New Rule Jon Huntsman must get a sex change. The only way he’s going to get any press coverage is by turning into a white woman and disappearing.
New Rule Starting this year, every appliance doesn’t need a clock on it. My stove, my dishwasher, my microwave, my VCR — all have clocks on them. If I really cared that much about what time it was (or what year it was), would I still have a VCR?
By: Bi Maher, Author of “The New Rules”, New York Times Opinion, December 30, 2011
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