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
Frank Luntz Always Makes Newt Gingrich Cry
At an Iowa campaign stop Friday morning, Newt Gingrich got all choked upremembering his late mother. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise: The event was emceed by GOP opinion-researcher-cum-stand-up-comedian Frank Luntz, and tearjerking is his M.O.
The event, at a downtown Des Moines coffeehouse, was styled as a focus group of moms, so Luntz asked Gingrich to recall his own mother, who died in 2003.
Gingrich recounted his mother’s final days in a long-term care facility, where she battled bipolar disorder, depression and physical ailments. It was that experience, he said, that prompted his interest in long-term care and Alzheimer’s disease. As he spoke, a baby in the audience wailed, suggestively perhaps, in the background.
“My whole emphasis on brain science comes indirectly from dealing –” Gingrich paused, winced and waved a hand, pleading, “you’ve got me all emotional!”, then continued — “dealing with the real problems of real people in my family. And so it’s not a theory. It’s, in fact, my mother.”
Parallels were instantly being drawn to the campaign-trail tears of Hillary Clinton, whose 2008 welling-up was thought to humanize her to voters, and Ed Muskie, whose emotionalism in 1972 helped kill his campaign. But it’s worth remembering that Gingrich has hardly been the picture of stoicism up to this point.
At a Thanksgiving forum in Des Moines in November, also moderated by Luntz, Gingrich was one of several candidates who broke down in tears. That time, the trigger was thinking about a friend’s baby who was born with a heart defect. Also shedding tears at that event were Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and Herman Cain; Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul managed not to crack.
“I feel like Dr. Phil!” Luntz joked at that earlier event, and it’s clear his manipulative lines of questioning — probing the candidates for the emotional pressure-points of family and faith — were responsible for the orgy of tears.
Unlike Hillary Clinton, Gingrich doesn’t suffer from a too-tough public persona. If anything, it’s the opposite — he’s seen as a loose cannon. The momentary front-runner, now fallen to a lowly fifth in Iowa polling, isn’t tanking because voters worry he’s too buttoned-up. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The candidate who could most use a tearful moment to soften his image as overly controlled and cerebral isn’t Gingrich. It’s Mitt Romney.
By: Molly Ball, The Atlantic, December 30, 2011
“Scaredy Cat’s”: Why Is No One Attacking Mitt Romney?
Mitt Romney’s confidence is brimming. The former Massachusetts governor, now widely seen as the favorite to win Iowa, announced Wednesday he’ll stay in the Hawkeye State the night of the caucus, a clear indication he anticipates a good result. If he does capture Iowa, he’ll head into New Hampshire, long his political stronghold, with a chance to become the first non-incumbent GOP presidential candidate ever to win the first two primary contests — a back-to-back triumph that would all but secure the nomination.
So, naturally, his Republican rivals have spent the last week castigating him on the trail and eviscerating him on TV, all in a desperate attempt to slow down his momentum and keep their own campaigns viable. Right? No — they’ve nearly done the opposite.
In a new radio ad released Wednesday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry set his sights not on Romney but on former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who is enjoying his own surge in Iowa. In the ad and on the campaign trail, Perry criticized Santorum’s previous support for earmarks, calling the ex-U.S. senator part of the big-spending Washington establishment. He does not, however, mention Romney.
It’s an old story this primary, where Romney has not faced the kind of withering attacks that normally confront a frontrunner. His rivals have trained their fire on one another instead.
Just examine the Iowa landscape this week as the campaigns make their last desperate push. Reps. Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul are at each other’s throats over the defection of the Minnesota congresswoman’s Iowa state chair.
Paul, meanwhile, has spent most of the last month barraging former House speaker Newt Gingrich with a litany of hard-hitting TV ads. Paul himself has received blistering criticism from Gingrich and Santorum, each of whom has said his isolationist-leaning foreign policy is unacceptable.
As they form a circular firing squad, Romney stepped back. Rather than engage his GOP opponents, as he’s done most of his campaign, he’s focused almost entirely on his No. 1 target, President Obama.
Romney has received cover from the primary’s unprecedented volatility (at least since 1964), which has sent a bushel of candidates to momentary stardom atop the Republican field only to be torn down weeks later. Attacks from rivals and media scrutiny have followed each of these momentary front-runners, who have risen and fallen through the fall, instead of Romney, as he plodded methodically along at 25 percent in most national polls.
And it’s not as though Romney, his past rooted in blue-state Massachusetts, didn’t supply his opponents plenty of ammunition. They have the bullets; they’re just not firing them.
By: Brian Snyder, The Atlantic, December 30, 2011
Feel Free To Ignore Iowa: The Iowa Caucuses Are Really Ridiculous
Only days until the Iowa caucuses! Can you believe it? Less than 8,000 minutes to go!
Perhaps this would be a good time to point out that the Iowa caucuses are really ridiculous.
Not Iowa itself, which is a lovely place despite being the only state besides Mississippi to never have elected a woman as governor or a member of Congress. (See if you can get to work on that, Iowa.) It has many things to recommend, including the Iowa State Fair, which, in my opinion, really sets the planetary pace when it comes to butter sculptures.
And Iowans are extremely nice people. I still have fond memories of the hot dog salesman at an aluminum-siding factory in Grinnell who rescued me from the Steve Forbes for President bus during a snowstorm.
Iowa does have terrible winters. Which limits participation in the caucuses, where attendance is already restricted to registered voters who are prepared to show up for a neighborhood meeting at 7 p.m. on Jan. 3.
The Republicans, who are really the only game in town this year, hope to get more than 100,000 participants. That is approximately the number of people who go to Michigan Stadium to watch the Wolverines play football. However, the Wolverines’ fans do not get free cookies.
Maybe the Republicans will hit 150,000! That is about the same number of people in Pomona, Calif. Imagine your reaction to seeing a story saying that a plurality of people in Pomona, Calif., thought Newt Gingrich would be the best G.O.P. presidential candidate. Would you say, “Wow! I guess Newt is now the de facto front-runner?” Possibly not.
Iowa caucusgoers are supposed to be particularly committed citizens who can make informed choices because they’ve had an opportunity to personally meet and interact with the candidates. Some of that does happen. In 2008, at the Democratic caucus I attended in Des Moines, there was unusually high support for Bill Richardson, mostly from people who said he had been to their house.
“Caucuses tend to foster more grass-roots participation,” said Caroline Tolbert, a professor at the University of Iowa and author of “Why Iowa?” — a question we should all be asking ourselves.
But, this year, the major candidates haven’t even spent all that much time in Iowa. Until recently, Gingrich only showed up for book signings and the occasional brain science lecture. And Iowa is actually not very good at picking the ultimate winner. The theory is that its caucuses winnow the field, that if you can’t manage to come in at least fourth, you are presidential toast. (John McCain came in fourth in 2008, with the support of 15,500 Iowans. This is approximately the number of people who live on my block.)
It’s that fourth-place goal that has Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry staggering around the state trying to visit all 99 counties and eat at least one meal a day at a Pizza Ranch outlet. (Pizza Ranch is a Christian-based, Iowa-based chain that has found success in the conviction that pizza tastes best in a cowboy-themed setting.)
“We have a good plan, and people like us,” Santorum told The Des Moines Register this week. “I hear this all the time. They say, ‘We really like you. You are on my list. You are No. 2 or No. 3 or No. 1,’ and that is a good place to be.”
People, if you had spent the last year doing virtually nothing but visiting with small clumps of voters across the state of Iowa, would you be energized when somebody told you he had you No. 3 on the list? At this point, polls suggest that Santorum could come in anywhere from first to fifth. But he’s still like a kid who so desperately lusts after the most popular girl in the class that he is thrilled by being told he will be permitted to drive said girl and her date to the prom.
On Tuesday, our Iowa voters will go off to 1,774 local caucuses, most of which will be held somewhere other than the normal neighborhood polling place. Those who figure out where to go will have to sit and listen to speeches on behalf of all the candidates. Scratch anybody who was hoping to dash out of work during a coffee break.
History suggests that in some rural districts, the entire caucus will consist of one guy named Earl. History also suggests that the majority of the caucusgoers will be social conservatives, which is perhaps a clue as to why Rick Perry discovered this week that he was actually against abortion even in the case of rape or incest.
To summarize: 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. The whole world will be watching. The cookies will be excellent.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 28, 2011
How Social Conservatives Blew It In Iowa
The 2012 “invisible primary” is looking likely to end just how and where it began: with Republican ideologues anxiously looking to Iowa for signs of an electable “true conservative” alternative to Mitt Romney. Depending on whom you ask, they have found no such candidate, or have found too many of them. In either case, despite their fevered hopes the First-in-the-Nation Caucus is not likely to play its intended role as an all-important arbiter where ideological squishes are disciplined or destroyed and the faithful find their champion. Indeed, from the perspective of a conservative movement hoping to consolidate its control over the GOP once and for all and make 2012 the beginning of the end for the New Deal, Iowa has been a big failure.
The sad spectacle of the FAMiLY Leader organization—whose board, after administering a controversial pledge document and then holding a candidate forum, could not reach agreement on an endorsement—is something of a microcosm of the Right’s failure to separate the sheep from the goats throughout the invisible primary. While FAMiLY Leader chieftains Bob Vander Plaats and Chuck Hurley eventually supplied “personal” endorsements for Rick Santorum, Vander Plaats has been subsequently begging Santorum supporters to contribute money to enable him to actually campaign for his candidate—a sign of the gesture’s probable futility. Given the fact that they are appealing to largely the same constituencies and are hardly flush with cash, neither Santorum nor Michele Bachmann seem very likely to win a big “ticket out of Iowa.” And Rick Perry, once the favorite of the Christian Right, is still holding onto an impressive war chest that will likely sustain him, but he’s got precious little else going for him other than the hope that he, rather than Gingrich, will survive through New Hampshire to make a late appeal to southerners. For his part, Newt has not been haunting the highways and byways of Iowa all that obsessively either; the big news for his campaign this week has been its opening of an all-volunteer headquarters in Sioux City, just his second outpost in the entire state.
Meanwhile, neither Mitt Romney nor Ron Paul seems likely to be influenced by the results in Iowa at all. While it’s true that Romney has moved decisively to the right in order to make himself minimally acceptable to today’s conservatives, he’s done so out of deference to the primary process as a whole—not the glare of publicity and pressure on the Iowa campaign trail, which he has largely ignored until very, very recently. Indeed, the main Romney footprint in the state has been via the nasty attack ads on Newt Gingrich launched by the “Restore the Future” super-PAC backing Romney. And while Ron Paul has done well in the target-rich Iowa environment of a low-turnout caucus (lots of home-schoolers and lots of eager college students), it’s not as though he’s doing much of anything he hasn’t been doing for many years. Moreover, it is certain that Paul’s campaign will continue right up until the convention no matter how he does in Iowa.
So the caucuses themselves will probably only cull one candidate from the field, no more than the Iowa Straw Poll back in August that ended Tim Pawlenty’s campaign. As Jonathan Bernstein has recently explained, barring a real upset Iowa’s influence over the nominating contest may well be reduced to spin: Did this or that candidate beat expectations, or set the table for success down the road? That is not a meaningless role to play, but after absorbing so many months of candidate and media attention, it’s hardly ideal from the point of view of Iowa triumphalists who consider their strange contest the epitome of deliberative democracy.
And for the high-riding right wing of the Republican Party—be they denoted as Tea Partiers, the Christian Right, or “constitutional conservatives”—it’s been a long and arguably pointless trip. Unable to use the unique leverage of Iowa to elevate Tim or Michele or Rick or Herman or Newt or the other Rick, they are now looking at genuinely long odds for denying the nomination to the man they do not want, Mitt Romney, who is more and more looking like the Richard Nixon of the early twenty-first century: the lowest common denominator of a political party in which leadership is in painfully short supply.
By: Ed Kilgore, The New Republic, December 23, 2011
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