Iowa’s $200-Per-Vote Caucuses Reward Negatives, Nastiness, Narrow Thinking
The Republicans who would be president, the super PACs and the surrogates had already spent more than $12 millionon television ads—almost half of them negative—before the final weekend leading up to Tuesday’s Iowa caucuses.
That doesn’t count the thousands of radio ads, mailings, lighted billboards in Des Moines and costs for staff.
Add it all up and there is a good chance that, when all is said and done Tuesday night, the candidates will have spent $200 a vote to influence the roughly 110,000 Iowans who are expected to participate in the GOP caucuses.
And the really unsettling thing is that the caucuses are just for show.
While the results may so damage some candidates that their runs for the presidency will be finished, they will not actually produce any delegates to the Republican National Convention.
That’s because, as the Des Moines Register notes, “Iowa delegates are not bound to vote for a specific candidate at the national convention, and no percentage of delegates is given to any one candidate (on caucus night).” Iowa Republican Party Executive Director Chad Olsen told the paper that the GOP caucus acts more as a “temperature gauge” of how Iowans feel about the candidates, and convention delegates use the results to inform their decision.
Seriously? All this for an glorified straw poll?
That’s the problem with the caucus system, which operates on an only slightly better model on the Democratic side.
Huge amounts of money are spent to influence a very small percentage of the electorate—less than 20 percent of Iowans who are likely to vote Republican in November will participate in Tuesday’s caucuses, and most of them will leave after the balloting finishes. An even smaller number of Iowans will begin the process of choosing representatives to county conventions, who in turn elect delegates to district and state conventions at which Iowa’s national delegates are actually selected.
Ultimately, party insiders are all but certain to form the delegation and choose how to vote at the national convention.
I don’t begrudge Iowa a place at the start of the calendar. In fact, I prefer that Midwesterners start things. But the caucuses are not the right way to begin.
The progressive movement of a century ago fought for open primaries, where all voters could easily participate and where the power of political bosses—and, ideally, outside money—could be overwhelmed by popular democracy.
There are good arguments to be made that primaries no longer hold out such promise, and I am not suggesting that open primaries will in and of themselves cure all that ails our politics. But the Iowa campaign of 2012 confirms that the caucuses are more prone to being warped by money and by rules that favor party bosses.
Iowa maintains a caucus system not because it is the best way to choose a nominee but because its first-in-the-nation status depends on a longstanding arrangement with New Hampshire, which claims the right to hold the first primary. Under the deal, Iowa can go first, so long as it does not hold a primary. Unfortunately, that means Iowa must hold caucuses. And the caucuses are a dysfunctional way to begin the process.
The parties have lacked the courage to demand a reform of this arrangement. But they should do so before the 2016 race begins because the presidential nominating process should not be defined by caucuses—in Iowa or anywhere else.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, January 1, 2012
Michele Bachmann’s Last Stand: Will Campaign End In Iowa?
She’s in last place in the polls in the state where she was born, but you wouldn’t know it by watching the relentlessly upbeat Michele Bachmann campaigning on Monday—the last day before Iowans go to the caucuses and, possibly, her last day as a presidential candidate.
Along with her husband, Marcus, Bachmann waded into packed shops and restaurants on a side street in West Des Moines to gamely sign autographs, chat up patrons, and pose for quick iPhone pictures with anyone who asked.
“We’re having a ball!” she said as she led a swarm of reporters and photographers from Paula’s Café across the street to the Diggity Dog pet bakery and on to the Floral Touch florist on the corner, where dozens of people had gone to escape the howling January wind. “This is what the Iowa Riviera feels like!” Bachmann joked.
But unlike her rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, who conducted a virtual siege of undecided voters across Iowa with last-minute “whistle-stop tours” and get-out-the-vote rallies, Bachmann’s only public events for the crucial last day were the impromptu lunchtime visit to West Des Moines and a 9 p.m. event at her headquarters in Urbandale.
Between her sparse schedule, the results of the recent Des Moines Register poll, which showed her solidly in last place, and an anemic $7,600 ad buy (her first and only television ads in the state), there was little doubt Monday that Bachmann was a happy warrior atop a campaign in its last throes of existence.
“I don’t think she has a chance,” said Charlie Freund, a Monday regular at Paula’s Café. “I think she’s a nice person, but she doesn’t have a chance.”
It’s a painfully inauspicious place for the Bachmann campaign to be after launching with fanfare amid a tide of Tea Party enthusiasm six months ago. As Sarah Palin sat on the sidelines, Bachmann jumped into the arena. She hired a top-tier campaign manager, used her Tea Party connections to raise millions of dollars, and rocketed to the front of the pack in early states like Iowa on the power of her personality and the novelty of her mom/lawyer/Obama-is-a-socialist message.
She peaked in August when she became the first woman ever to win the Ames Straw Poll, an early victory that the media downplayed as a fluke, but was at least real enough to send Tim Pawlenty scrambling from the race.
But several verbal gaffes and failed fact-checks later, Bachmann found herself struggling to raise money or her position in the standings, which cratered as skittish GOP voters dashed from one favorite candidate to another and dumped Bachmann in favor of the swashbuckling Texan Rick Perry just days after she won the straw poll. She also had serial staff problems, as Ed Rollins, her campaign manager, left the campaign as quickly as he had joined it, right up through the day she watched her Iowa campaign chairman defect to Ron Paul at a televised rally just days before the caucuses.
Voters who initially felt they had connected with her backed away as they judged her not ready for primetime.
“She lost it in the debates for me,” said Mark Lundberg, the chairman of the Sioux County Republican Party, who remains undecided about whom he’ll caucus for, but knows it won’t be Bachmann.
Larry Steele, from Knoxville, Iowa, said he went to see Bachmann at Floral Touch, but is planning to caucus for Rick Santorum because he seems the most like Mike Huckabee, whom he supported in 2008. “Santorum seems to share my values,” he said.
Despite the ominous signs all around her, Bachmann has refused to show any outward indications of panic, or even concern, right until the very end.
“I will fearlessly stand on the stage and take on Barack Obama, defeat him in the debates, and go on to win and be the next president of the United States,” Bachmann said in front of her hulking campaign bus Monday, likening herself to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in her closing campaign argument. “My goal is to be America’s Iron Lady, and that’s what I intend to do.”
As a part of a specific pitch to women voters, Bachmann’s Iowa ad also makes the connection to Thatcher’s strong-woman, “Iron Lady” persona. “I am women’s best candidate,” she told me in the flower shop. “They need to vote for Michele Bachmann.”
She also insisted that no matter the results in Iowa, her campaign will go on. “We already bought and paid for our tickets to South Carolina and we already have events scheduled, so we’re on our way,” she said. She also promised to go to New Hampshire and build a 50-state campaign operation, a promise made more difficult to keep amid rumors of a poor fourth quarter of fundraising.
But the news wasn’t all bad for Bachmann on Monday. Just mostly bad.
The Des Moines Register reported that she had won the “Coffee Bean Caucus” at the Hamburg Inn, a diner in Iowa City that famously invites patrons to drop a coffee bean into a canister for their favorite candidate. Bachmann won with 28.8 percent of the GOP vote, beating out Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, and Newt Gingrich, in that order. The only cloud over Bachmann’s victory was Barack Obama’s bean count, which was six times more than hers and more than all of the GOP beans combined.
One person who would have dropped a bean for Bachmann if he had been there was Caleb Sisson, an 18-year-old student and Bachmann convert who was thrilled after meeting her in West Des Moines. “It’s really cool to see her come into town and try to meet everybody,” Caleb said. “I’d absolutely vote for her.” One catch, though. Caleb was in Des Moines on a school trip … from Ohio.
By: Patricia Murphy, The Daily Beast, January 3, 2011
Republican Presidential Primary: A Quiz for All Seasons
What a big week coming up! New Year’s Day and then the Iowa caucuses! Doesn’t get any better than that. And, in honor of this double-whammy of exciting events, here’s the End-of-the-Year Republican Presidential Primary Quiz:
I. Which of the following has Rick Perry not gotten wrong, so far, during his presidential campaign:
A) Number of Supreme Court justices
B) Legal voting age in the United States
C) Date of the election
D) Whether New Hampshire has a primary or caucuses
E) Number of stars on the Texas state flag
F) Name of the late leader of North Korea
G) Century in which the American Revolution was fought
II. “I was born free!/Born free!/Free, like a river raging. … Wild, like an untamed stallion” is a quote from:
A) The opening of Rick Perry’s biography
B) Newt Gingrich’s third wedding vows
C) Mitt Romney’s campaign theme song
D) Ron Paul poem entitled “World Without Fed”
III. Match the speaker:
1) “She was hot and got ratings.”
2) “He’s a big cereal hound.”
3) “I had dinner last night with Jim Perry. I was impressed with him.”
4) “He’s on the battlefield right now fighting the battles God wants him to fight. The only way I get through it is daily Mass and keeping my prayer life in order.”
5) “She hates Muslims. She hates them. She wants to go get ’em.”
6) “… He really wants my endorsement. I mean, he wants it very badly.”
A) Ann Romney on husband Mitt
B) Donald Trump on Mitt Romney
C) Donald Trump on Rick Perry
D) Karen Santorum on husband Rick
E) Roger Ailes on Sarah Palin
F) Ron Paul on Michele Bachmann
IV. Finish the quote:
1. Rick Perry: “Maybe it’s time to have some provocative language in this country and say things like”:
A) “Yippee Ki Yay.”
B) “Nobody likes Mitt Romney. Face it.”
C) “Close the Departments of Education, Commerce and, yes, Energy!”
D) “Let’s get America working again”
2. Ron Paul on border security: “Every time you think of a fence, keeping all those bad people out, think about maybe those fences being used”:
A) “To keep in those alligators Herman Cain talks about.”
B) “As building materials.”
C) “Against us. Keeping us in.”
D) “For 2,000 miles worth of graffiti.”
3. Michele Bachmann: “There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe”:
A) “In intelligent design.”
B) “That vaccines cause mental retardation.”
C) “That the founding fathers eliminated slavery.”
D) “That I should be president of the United States.”
V. Match the money:
1) Said mortgage giant Freddie Mac paid him $300,000 for his advice “as a historian.”
2) Double-dipping gets him a quarter-million in state salary and pension combined.
3) Got $68,000 for appearing at the International Franchise Association convention in Las Vegas.
4) Although he appears sort of unemployed, he actually made $970,000 last year.
A) Rick Santorum
B) Newt Gingrich
C) Mitt Romney
D) Rick Perry
VI. Match the candidate with a high point from his book:
1) Mitt Romney
2) Herman Cain
3) Rick Perry
4) Ron Paul
5) Newt Gingrich
A) He’s “the kind of guy who goes jogging in the morning, packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow-point bullets and shoots a coyote that is threatening his daughter’s dog.”
B) Tells the reader how to become the C.E.O. of Self.
C) “Chicken-hawks are individuals who dodged the draft when their numbers came up but who later became champions of senseless and undeclared wars when they were influencing foreign policy. Former Vice President Cheney is the best example of this disgraceful behavior.”
D) His daughter and co-author tells about the time she averted a meltdown during a TV makeup session by begging her father to “Close your eyes and go to a happy place.”
E) “I love jokes and I love laughing.”
ANSWERS:
I-E; II-C; III: 1-E, 2-A, 3-C, 4-D, 5-F, 6-B; IV: 1-D, 2-C, 3-A; V: 1-B, 2-D; 3-C; 4-A; VI: 1-E, 2-B, 3-A, 4-C, 5-D.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 30, 2011
A Straight-Talking, Truth-Telling Machine?: Tim Pawlenty’s Version Of The “Truth”
Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty formally kicked off his Republican presidential campaign yesterday, and after struggling to come up with a rationale for his candidacy, he’s apparently settled on a theme. Pawlenty, we’re told, will be a straight-talking, truth-telling machine.
As rationales go, I suppose this isn’t bad. Indeed, Pawlenty took steps to back this up, telling Iowans he wants a gradual phasing out of federal ethanol subsidies, and noting that he’s headed to Florida to endorse overhauling Medicare and Social Security. Pawlenty has spent many years saying the exact opposite, but why quibble? This is the new Pawlenty, speaking truth to power, and adopting the mantle of the last honest man in American politics — or so we’re supposed to believe.
But for a man who used the word “truth” 16 times in his campaign kick-off speech, Pawlenty is already undercutting his message with all kinds of falsehoods.
An hour after his official launch, Pawlenty talked to Rush Limbaugh, who noted in 2006 that Pawlenty said that “the era of small government is over” and that “government has to be more proactive, more aggressive.” Pawlenty responded that the newspaper article that published those remarks was wrong; the paper ran a correction; and that he was only quoting someone else.
Dana Milbank looked into this and discovered that Pawlenty “had taken some liberties with the facts.”
The article is all about Pawlenty’s efforts as governor to take on drug and oil companies and other practitioners of “excessive corporate power.” It includes his boast that many ideological Republicans “don’t even talk to me anymore” because of his support for things such as the minimum wage.
“The era of small government is over,” Pawlenty told the newspaper. “I’m a market person, but there are certain circumstances where you’ve got to have government put up the guardrails or bust up entrenched interests before they become too powerful…. Government has to be more proactive, more aggressive.”
The newspaper did issue a “clarification,” but only to say that Pawlenty’s quote about small government was “in reference to a point” made by the conservative writer David Brooks — one that Pawlenty, from his other comments, obviously agreed with.
Of course he did. In 2006, Pawlenty wasn’t well liked by the far-right, as he defended big government, endorsed cap-and-trade, wanted to reimport prescription medication from Canada, and wanted officials to be more effective and aggressive in fighting the oil industry.
Everything he told Limbaugh yesterday, just like the new persona he’s struggling to adopt, just isn’t true.
And really, that’s just scratching the surface. Wonk Room ran a fact-check piece yesterday, noting seven obvious lies Pawlenty told yesterday, on issues ranging from health care on the nation’s finances. Similarly , the AP ran a similar piece, highlighting several more of the candidate’s falsehoods from yesterday.
Pawlenty needs to realize that those who base their entire message on offering candor and uncomfortable truths face an even tougher burden — they’re inviting even tougher scrutiny. By lying repeatedly on his first day as a national candidate, Pawlenty is off to an ignominious start.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly, Political Animal, May 24, 2011
How The Right Brought The Trump Birther Madness On Itself
GOP primary voters should reward substance, rather than pols who masterfully exploit hot button issues. So why are so many Republicans embracing Donald Trump? They’ve been trained to elevate politicians based on the “tough” rhetoric they use rather than the record they’ve amassed. And to rally around anyone seen as being disrespected by the dread mainstream media.
The talk radio right bears much of the blame for these pathologies. Caught up in the Tea Party excitement, guys like Mark Levin used their platforms to act as apologists for Republicans like Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell. Didn’t they fire up the base? Weren’t they unafraid to zing President Obama? As Donald Trump rises in the polls, however, Levin is having second thoughts. The right is suddenly foolish to embrace demagogues with thin resumes and incoherent political philosophies. For all their differences, folks like Ross Douthat, David Frum, Reihan Salam, David Brooks, Daniel Larison, and many others have long been urging the GOP to pick its champions based on substance. You’ll never hear any of them urge that Donald Trump be taken seriously.
Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is defending Trump. Will Levin call out the woman whose political judgment he has frequently touted? Rush Limbaugh is inviting Trump on his show for softball interviews, and telling callers to his program that the celebrity billionaire ought to be taken “half-seriously.” Having announced that taking Trump at all seriously is idiocy of the highest order, will Levin openly criticize his fellow talk radio host? Or does this bully lack the courage to go after anyone with a bigger audience than his? Remember that the next time he tries to tell you that the reformers embody what’s wrong with the right. Like all bullies, his targets aren’t chosen based on desert.
In failing to call out the people most responsible for the right’s pathologies, Mark Levin is not alone. As Adam Serwer notes:
Trump’s candidacy is largely a problem of the GOP’s own making. It’s a symptom of circumstances Republicans have spent the last two years tacitly cultivating as an asset. Republican leaders have at best refused to tamp down the most outlandish right-wing conspiracy-mongering about the president and at worst have actively enabled it. The result: A substantial portion of their base believes a complete myth about the president’s birth certificate, and Republicans are stuck with a candidate shameless enough to exploit the issue without resorting to the usual euphemisms more respectable Republicans tend to employ when hinting at the president’s supposed cultural otherness. I don’t know how you solve a problem like Donald Trump, but I know it’s a problem the Republican Party brought on itself.
Indeed, half of the Iowa GOP are birthers. It’s so much of a problem that Ann Coulter and Karl Rove are out there assuring everyone that President Obama was in fact born in the United States. In doing so, they frame Birtherism as a trap liberals are setting. They’re implicitly criticizing all the mainstream voices on the right who’ve flirted with Birtherism, but are uninclined to name names, or to come right out and state that what those conservatives did has come back to bite the right.
Some of us have long insisted that the conservative movement was going to pay for its embrace of demagoguery, anti-intellectualism, bombast in place of substance, and shameless pandering. For our trouble, we’ve been dismissed by talk radio hosts and conservative bloggers, who took an ends-justify-the-means approach to the 2010 primaries and opposition to President Obama generally. Lo and behold, the conservative movement is now paying a price, exactly as predicted. The GOP has a weak field for 2012, and although Donald Trump isn’t going to win the nomination, his early status as a front-runner is an unwelcome distraction and may end up pulling other candidates toward the sort of absurd populism that will hurt them in a general election.
Even Mark Levin, Ann Coulter and Karl Rove now see these pathologies on the right, and the dangers they pose. So are they going to criticize the most prominent conservatives who brought these conditions about? Nope. There is never direct intra-movement criticism of Rush Limbaugh or Roger Ailes. There is never any appreciation of the pathologies encouraged by everyone who supported Sarah Palin. Instead we get self-righteous criticism that is too little, too late, and a cowardly refusal to confront the culpable parties in a way that would prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, April 21, 2011
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