Primaries don't count?
CC Image courtesy of Tom Arthur
By Alan Pell Crawford
The morning after the Iowa caucuses, Kathleen Parker spoke for the whole Beltway intelligentsia in announcing that regardless of which Republican candidate Iowans preferred, “it doesn’t really matter.” Mitt Romney would be their presidential candidate whether Iowans preferred him or not, and all that remains to be decided is who will be his running mate.
Jacob Weisberg in Slate, trying somewhat pathetically to distinguish himself from the rest of the pack, would have us believe he’s the only one to reach precisely the same conclusion as Parker. “The media will desperately try to persuade you there is still a Republican race,” he wrote the same day. “Do not pay attention,” because Romney’s got it sewed up.
‘Neighborhood Huddles’
Whatever else their certitude tells us, their contempt for the whole primary process, suggested by Parker in her reference to Iowans “in their neighborhood huddles,” seems pretty obvious. No matter what meaning people in Iowa might attach to their quaint and meaningless rituals, nobody else takes them seriously. If you’re part of the pack, all you care about one primary is what it might signal about the next, so you can start yapping about that.
The political establishment had already decided the Iowa returns were meaningless before they were ever known. Terrified that Rep. Ron Paul might actually win, Terry Branstad, Iowa’s own Republican governor, said before the caucuses that, even if Paul won, the real question would be where Romney finished. Politico, correctly, took this to mean Republicans elsewhere should “ignore” a victory by the Texas libertarian, which according to Fox News’ Chris Wallace, party leaders say “won’t count.”
‘Committed’ Voters
To the political class, the voters are viewed increasingly as a nuisance; the primaries, likewise, exist merely to ratify choices the two parties’ leaders have already made. What Parker calls the “preferences of a handful of Americans belonging to a committed, ideological subset of a committed, ideological party”—primary voters, that is—“do not a national trend suggest.”
Maybe not, but isn’t that for the primary voters, and not party leaders in Des Moines and Washington, D.C., to determine?
Good article Alan. I think alot of people like me, are fed-up with both parties and pulling for Ron Paul.
Argoman: I think more and more people feel exactly as you do. I used to work for Dr. Paul, back when he was in Congress the first time. He’s a good man. Alan