This piece graced the pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on January 4, 2008, but additional post-caucus bloviations are appended
Back when we were living amongst them, I thought that Iowans held their caucuses early just so they could bask in all the national media exposure that would never come their way otherwise. However, this year’s scramble by so many states to get their primaries pushed up as close to New Year’s day as possible suggests that there is a lot more at stake here than emotional gratification. A Boston Globe report shows that in the recent congressional appropriations bill vetoed by President Bush as too wasteful, Iowa, the nation’s thirtieth most populous state, was slated to receive the seventh-highest earmarked windfall, roughly $37 million. Beyond that, an additional $50 million in federal matching funds has been allocated for “Earthpark,” an indoor rain forest, dubbed “Earthpork” by critics, that would be located on the shores of beautiful Red Rock Lake near Pella, a town of 10,000, situated on Highway 163 along the famous Prairie City-Oskaloosa tourist corridor.
The really big-time “we-pick-first” payoff to Iowa, however, comes in the form of the roughly $2 billion in ethanol subsidies and trade protection benefits (about one-third of the national total) accruing to the state each year. We taxpayers are currently underwriting ethanol production at an estimated rate of 51 cents per gallon, and there is significant research suggesting that producing a gallon of ethanol requires substantially more fossil fuel energy than that gallon of ethanol actually contains. Never ones to be swayed by scientific data if polling data says otherwise, however, save for John McCain, our presidential hopefuls suddenly just can’t get enough of that ethanol-laced Kool-Aid, the latest imbiber being Fred Thompson, who voted against the subsidies back during his Senate gig but now realizes their vital importance to “national security.”
Other states are now rushing to line up behind Iowa in hopes of cashing in on a few early-bird specials. Michigan bumped its primary all the way up to January 15, in part, at least, to force the presidential candidates to talk about the needs and problems of the auto industry. New Mexico and Utah agreed jointly on a February 5 primary date because, the West, with its particular concerns on issues such as water, land use, and nuclear waste has heretofore been what Utah Governor Jon Huntsman describes as largely “irrelevant in presidential politics.”
After much last-minute jostling and maneuvering, six states will have already expressed their presidential preferences by the end of January, and twenty-two more will have their say on February 5. Although the selection process looks much different this year, the primary schedule was still being reshuffled in November, and for the most part, the candidates have followed the familiar old strategy of plopping a lot of their eggs in the Iowa and New Hampshire baskets. In South Carolina, for example, it seems candidates and voters are just beginning to get acquainted, although the primary is less than three weeks away. The states that moved their primaries into January will doubtless get more individual attention from the candidates than they would have otherwise, but in terms of face time with candidates promising good times and gravy to come, the February 5 “Gang of 22” is probably headed for a disappointment.
Conveying interest in local concerns is an instinctive skill for all successful politicians, but from where I sit, lavishing inordinate attention on the early bird primary states is akin assuming that the concerns of those who have pushed their way up to the rope line at a campaign rally are more valid than those of the masses behind them. In turn, allowing the broader candidate selection process to be influenced so heavily by the choices of voters in a handful of states, some of them arguably atypical, surely amounts to picking the persons who will contend to be president of all the people based on their effectiveness in pandering to the preferences and whims of a mighty small and not necessarily representative sample of those people.
. Apropos of the the point I was trying to make in the final paragraph, it was fun to see good old Angela Mitchell, whose latest facelift is so tight that she can't wiggle her toes with her eyes shut, proclaiming that 'the torch has been passed" to Barack Obama, based on the fact that he managed to stuff roughly 20,000 more Iowa Democrats into elementary school classrooms than Hillary Clinton did. Much has been made of Obama's success in a state where the mere glimpse of a black person still carries the presumption that said person must have missed the exit for Chicago, and I'm certainly not discounting his accomplishment. Still, in early primary elections where the presidency really isn't on the line yet, voters are traditionally suckers for the proponents of change, even those short on specifics. (Fully aware of the irony, I point to George Wallace's success in northern primaries in 1968.) It'll be interesting to see whether the folks at Fortress Hillary decide to take the gloves all the way off their girl in an attempt force Obama to mix a little more substance in with all that style. If they do, it will likewise be interesting to see whether voters take all that kindly to seeing their golden boy roughed up. I'm also eager to see whether black voters who have leaned toward Clinton primarily because they doubted that Obama could actually win might now reassess their postion based on the Iowa results. Regardless of how much one can make of those results, one thing's for sure: Hillary campaigned her frozen butt and persona off in Iowa, and there ain't no way to spin what happened there as a good sign for her. My gut, along with her consistently high negatives in polling data, has always told me that there are a lot of people outside New York (and at the very least, Iowa reminds outfits like the New York Times that there actually are such people) who simply dislike her too much as a person to support her as a presidential candidate. Don't kid yourself, she's a long way from dead, but when a lot of people are looking for excuses not to support you, gaffes and stumbles hurt you a lot worse than they might otherwise. On the Republican side, Rev. Mike Huckabee, the GOP's "breath of fresh air" equivalent to Obama, frustrated Mitt "Moneybags" Romney with his surprisingly strong showing. At this point, however, I still can't escape the feeling that Huckabee, who drew the majority of his support from evangelicals, is also something of a "protest" candidate, whose success reflects, at least in part, Republican voters' dissatisfaction with their other choices. Fervor is a good thing in politics, but cash is a lot better, and unless some of the Republicans' big guns put aside their fears about Pastor Mike's previous lapses into populism and open their hearts and checkbooks to him, it's going to be hard for him to get his message across in the twenty seven states that will hold primaries over the next month, especially since his "major player" status now gurarantees that he will have to devote a lot more effort to defending himself than he did when not many people took him seriously. Stay tuned, folks, it ain't football, but it's all we got.
