This guy is scarry a demigod the flag and God!
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OH WELL HERE IS THE REAL WINNER
Will Edwards Really Win Iowa? »
December 30, 2007 03:49 PM
East Des Moines, Iowa -- By local weather standards, it's a great Sunday morning. Bitter cold but no snow and no wind. And Alise Roderer, a young field organizer for the John Edwards campaign, is brightly encouraged by the tentative sunlight. Yesterday her volunteer canvass teams knocked on a thousand local doors. Today she hopes for the same.
"It's really, really important that you stress to the undecided that John Edwards is the most electable Democrat," she says to about 25...
Caucus Fatigue: Voicemail Edition
Among other indicators that Iowans are getting sick of caucus season, one Edwards phone banker told me he heard this message on an Iowa resident's voicemail (his paraphrase):
"Hello, this is Mr. X. If you are a presidential candidate or calling on behalf of a presidential candidate, please do not leave a message. Otherwise, please leave a message."
Nader Gives His Support to Edwards
MUSCATINE, Iowa — Ralph Nader unleashed on Hillary Rodham Clinton Monday - criticizing her for being soft on defense spending and a chum of big business - and expressed his strong support for John Edwards.In an 11th hour effort to encourage liberal Iowans to "recognize" Edwards by "giving him a victory," the activist and former presidential contender said in an interview that Clinton will "pander to corporate interest groups" if elected. Nader specifically accused Clinton of failing to challenge military spending because "she is a woman who doesn't want to be labeled as soft on defense and she doesn't want to be shown as taking on big business." As Clinton campaigned through a snowstorm in southeast Iowa, pledging to "bring about the changes we need," Nader accused the Democratic senator from New York of using empty rhetoric. "[Clinton] has not led the way against the avalanche of military contracting, corporate crime, fraud and abuse," he said. "We want to inform the people of Iowa about Hillary Clinton because all the focus is on, do they have the experience and do they have the personal charisma, and can they cross the aisle" Nader said. "The issue is corporate power and who controls our political system and it's not who has experience for six years or two years," he said, alluding to an ongoing debate over experience between Clinton and freshman Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). "She has experience in the Senate, and what that experience has meant is going soft on cracking down on corporate crime, fraud, and abuse, soft on cutting tens of millions in corporate subsidies," he continued.
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The Iowa Scam
The undemocratic caucuses are a terrible way to choose a presidential candidate.
It is quite astonishing to see with what deadpan and neutral a tone our press and television report the open corruption—and the flagrantly anti-democratic character—of the Iowa caucuses. It's not enough that we have to read of inducements openly offered to potential supporters—I almost said "voters"—even if these mini-bribes only take the form of "platters of sandwiches" and "novelty items" (I am quoting from Sunday's New York Times). It's also that campaign aides are showing up at Iowan homes "with DVD's that [explain] how the caucuses work." Nobody needs a DVD to understand one-person-one-vote, a level playing field, and a secret ballot. The DVD and the other gifts and goodies (Sen. Barack Obama is promising free baby-sitting on Thursday) are required precisely because none of those conditions applies in Iowa. In a genuine democratic process, these Tammany tactics would long ago have been declared illegal. But this is not a democratic process, and besides, as my old friend Michael Kinsley used to say about Washington, the scandal is never about what's illegal. It's about what's legal.
Every now and then, in the avalanche of tripe coverage that is provided by a mass media that (never forget) is the direct beneficiary of the huge outlays of money the candidates make, a sentence of ordinary truth shines through. Thus the following, from the bended-knee profile of Mike Huckabee, by Zev Chafets in the New York Times Magazine, describing events in the last week in October, when:
[T]he Hawkeye Poll of the University of Iowa was published. Huckabee had 13 percent, in a virtual tie with Rudy Giuliani for second place, behind Mitt Romney with 36. At that point, the Huckabee bandwagon didn't seem all that amazing to Iowa veterans. "Actually, it is pretty straightforward," said Prof. David Redlawsk, director of the University of Iowa's Hawkeye Poll. "About 45 percent of 85,000 or so Republican caucus voters are evangelical Christians. Roughly half of them automatically vote for the most socially conservative candidate in the race, and it looks like they have decided that's Huckabee. The other half can be won over, too—if they think he's electable."
So, once you subtract the breathless rhetoric about "surge" and "momentum" and (oh, Lord) "electability," it's finally admitted that the rest of the United States is a passive spectator while about half of 45 percent of 85,000 or so Republican caucus voters promote a provincial ignoramus and anti-Darwinian to the coveted status of "front-runner" or at least "contender."
Now, something as absurd and counterdemocratic as this can be so only if the media say it is so, and every four years for as long as I can remember, the profession has been promising to swear off the bottle and stop treating the Iowa caucuses as if they were a primary, let alone an election. Credit Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post for being the first writer this year to try to hold his fellow journalists to that pledge:
Without that massive media boost, prevailing in Iowa would be seen for what it is: an important first victory that amounts to scoring a run in the top of the first inning.
"It stinks," says veteran political reporter Jack Germond. "The voters ought to have time to make a considered decision, and the press ought to be a little less poll-driven, and we're not." Between the coverage and the hyper-compressed campaign calendar, he says, "the whole system this year is absolutely a disgrace."
The term of choice for the more thoughtful reporters, in describing the Iowa rules, is "arcane." Kurtz used it, as did his colleague Dan Balz, in briefly telling the truth about the even more scandalous situation on the Democratic side:
With its arcane caucus rules, Iowa remains a small battlefield. Only 124,000 Democrats voted last time, less than a quarter of those eligible. So if Barack Obama, say, edges Hillary Clinton by 2,000 votes, he'll be hailed in headlines as a giant-killer despite the tiny margin.
That's true enough, but how can an establishment media critic be so absolutely sure that all his colleagues will, in fact, behave this badly? Can it be, as I hinted above, that the other "arcane" process (the arduous and dubious "money primary") is mainly determined by the imperative need to buy advertising spots in the same media that knowingly cover a phony process as if it were a real one?
It's only when you read an honest reporter like Dan Balz that you appreciate the depth and extent of the fraud that is being practiced on us all. "In a primary," as he put it, "voters quietly fill out their ballots and leave. In the caucuses, they are required to come and stay for several hours, and there are no secret ballots. In the presence of friends, neighbors and occasionally strangers, Iowa Democrats vote with their feet, by raising their hands and moving to different parts of the room to signify their support for one candidate or another. … [F]or Democrats, it is not a one-person, one-vote system. … Inducements are allowed; bribes are not." One has to love that last sentence.
I was in Des Moines and Ames in the early fall, and I must say that, as small and landlocked and white and rural as Iowa is, I would be happy to give an opening bid in our electoral process to its warm and generous and serious people. But this is not what the caucus racket actually does. What it does is give the whip hand to the moneyed political professionals, to the full-time party hacks and manipulators, to the shady pollsters and the cynical media boosters, and to the supporters of fringe and crackpot candidates. It is impossible that the Republican Party could be saddled with a clown like Huckabee if there were a serious primary in Iowa, let alone if the process were kicked off in Chicago or Los Angeles or Atlanta. (Remember that not Iowa but its "caucuses" put Pat Robertson ahead of George H.W. Bush in the race for the GOP nomination in 1988.) The process might be a good way for Iowa to pick its party convention delegates, though I frankly doubt even that. It is an absolutely terrible way in which to select candidates for the presidency, and it makes the United States look and feel like a banana republic both at home and overseas.
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