The Iowan Farce

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…”

The Iowa caucuses are over, and the media is again frothing over the impending New Hampshire primary and the subsequent South Carolina primary.

The Madison Conservative has previously commented on the overall absurdity and basic unconstitutionality of elevating these private enterprise beauty contests to the level of a true democratic republic election, and thus we will not belabor the point further.

The lessons of  Iowa are however stark in their reality and history has taught us that if we do not learn from our history and the mistakes we collectively as a nation have made, then we are doomed to repeat those mistakes again, and in certain cases repeat them in perpetuity.

Let us examine more closely some of the lessons of the Iowa follies of 2011. There were, as the mass media tells us, several ‘viable’ candidates, and that in the aftermath of the caucus, one such candidate, Representative Michelle Bachmann, withdrew from the race. The notion of ‘viability’ is an interesting concept and the storyline that some of the candidates would be forced to withdraw from contention is a dangerous path to take.

To wit:

There were roughly 123,000 total votes cast in the caucus. According to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), there were approximately 303, 824, 640 registered voters in the United States as of the 2008 presidential election. There are no further updated counts to be found via the FEC, despite the fact we have had three national elections in the interim; apparently the FEC only considers the numbers of registered to be of significance only in a quadrennial way.

Simple math thus tells us that each Iowa vote cast represents approximately 2,469 American voters, or in other words a state that encompasses 1/50^th of the United States body politic has become so powerful in deciding this nations fate with only a true 1/2469^th representative sampling.

This was most assuredly not what the founders and the framers had intended.

Another lesson from the Iowa state circus was the perpetuation of the political class and the media’s love affair with it. Of the seven ‘viable’ candidates, somehow all of them warranted some level of political titular honor despite the reality that most of them are again no more than mere citizens.

To wit:

Mitt Romney is no longer a governor, yet he is continually addressed as such.

The same fact applies to Jon Huntsman.

Newt Gingrich has not been the Speaker of the House since the late 1990’s; how he retains the title is indeed suspect.

The American electorate needs to dissuade the media from creating a elective class that believes in political titular birthrights. It is a dangerous trend in American politics and does not bode well for the future of American democracy if we afford nornmal citizens a lifetime title.

The biggest lesson that should be taken from the Iowa process is that six or seven people on a stage with a minute time frame can never and will never provide the people of this nation with an honest and intellectual airing of the issues which confront the nation.

The media providing the insipid and intellectual lightweight questioning should also be shunned as nothing more than carnival barkers hawking the two headed dog as being something of substance. It is insult to the American people. The electorate should demand debates in the Lincoln- Douglas model: subjects discussed openly and honestly for hours without an eye to creating a sound bite for the media.

If we do not heed these lessons from Iowa and the subsequent primaries of private entities, than we shall, as the saying goes, get the government we deserve.