The Iowa Democratic Party ushered in the first presidential caucus in 1972. The Republican Party of Iowa jumped on the bandwagon four years later. With their Feb. 3, 2020 debacle, which has provided national pundits plenty of fodder for ridicule, the Democrats hosted their last presidential caucus. And so will have the Republicans.
I know that it’s not yet official. And I am also aware that, in a show of rare bipartisan unity, Governor Kim Reynolds, and Senators Charles Grassley and Joni Ernst assured us and the rest of the country “that every last vote will be counted and every last voice will be heard.” They’re wrong and this is why: because we are no longer trusted.
As Peggy Noonan opined in her Feb. 6 Wall Street Journal Opinion piece: “You know what Iowa really tells us? Anything can happen now ̶ anything. Because rigor in politics is waning, the old disciplines are not holding, old responsibilities are being thrown off. [The caucuses] were a failure of competence by people who were just passing through and burnishing their personal brands.”
The Iowa caucuses, past tense, were one of the few good, dependable filters in our national electoral system. They were grassroots, requiring inordinate amounts of personal time and energy to be invested by each potential candidate. In one of the few places left to do so in America, regular people stood face-to-face with names like Sanders, Biden, Giuliani, Fiorina, Clinton, Jackson, Forbes, Obama, Santorum, Clinton, Mondale, Glenn, Dole, Forbes, Romney, “H.W.”, “W.”, and Jeb Bush.
We saw them without their make-up, but in their wrinkled slacks and their campaign-weary, tired eyes. Kerry cooked his own goose here years ago when he went into a corner cafe, in what was the last cafe standing in that very small town and, after reviewing the menu, asked for a cob salad. There hadn’t been a cob salad seen on that menu for years which revealed how far removed Nantucket is from places like Kent.
And Giuliani? When I greeted him in my waiting room, I experienced a pair of eyes like that of a Walleye. Cold, cloudy and without life ̶ until the main stage lights were turned on. Scary stuff.
Money didn’t buy votes. Slick campaign advertisements didn’t sway the electorate. Candidates that wore wingtips or pumps in Washington, D.C. Monday-Friday, but slipped into their cowboy boots on Saturday and Sunday when visiting out-of-the way places like Creston, Corning, or Clarence were outed in a nanosecond.
Iowans got pretty good at separating the good kernels from the bad cobs, and our nation was the better for it; but not anymore.
We’re told that the app failed, which is the political class’ way of telling the citizens of this state that the dog ate their homework. I’m sure I tried that excuse, or something like that excuse, sometime in junior high school. It was as lame then as it is now. The app didn’t fail. The people who created the app ̶ the movers, shakers, and other political professionals failed. They failed the process. They failed our people. These are the same people that now want to manage our healthcare and economy. And they have now provided a fast lane for every late night talk show host to perpetuate every stereotype that has ever been attached to our home.
The only people who aren’t getting it are the insiders who want us to believe “that every last vote will be counted and every last voice will be heard.” The one true fact in this cacophony of misdirection is this: the voices of regular people won’t be heard anymore. Like the guy caught on camera asking Elizabeth Warren if her student debt forgiveness plan would reimburse him for the years of working a second job so that he could put his daughter through college, debt-free. That means, sadly, that the Elizabeth Warrens of the world will be yet another layer of truth away from how the world really works for the folks out here ̶ which is America, by the way.
So if there is ever going to be another caucus, it will be because of a crisis like the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Regular citizens demanded a change then as they will, hopefully, one day demand again, here. And not because politicians, many of whom have been in office too long, assure us that all is still good and decent. It’s not.
The trust with the citizens of this state has been broken by both parties; by the Democrats in 2020 and the Republicans in 2012.
“Trust me,” just doesn’t work anymore.
I enjoyed your reflective piece on the Iowa caucus. It is hard to say the word ‘caucus’ now without hanging one’s head in shame. Regarding the responses made by Gov Reynolds and Senators Ernst and Grassley, the following quote by WF Buckley comes to mind, “ I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.“
Thank you, Alan!!
Jeff
Interesting and thoughtful, Jeff. Thank you. So much has changed in recent years in all elections, whether we’re talking about a caucus, a primary, a general…or just the campaigns in general. Social media and 24/7 “news” cycles have also been huge contributing factors in the insanity and “branding” efforts on the part of these campaigns, too. Those platforms make “political experts” out of the guy at the end of the bar, and the increasing inability to ferret out the credible from in-credible makes all sources suspect. And that, I think, is because social media is much less risky than having a face to face conversation with someone, and opening oneself up to the possibility that one’s opinion might not be the final word.
I appreciated how Turkish novelist and political commentator Ece Temelkuran put it, when she was warning the U.S. about the corrosive effects of social media on any democracy:
“Thanks to social media, we are constantly faced with the worst side of human beings – but often we are shielded from seeing the other side, the good, the wholeness of the human story… we’ve come to expect outrage and to feel appalled – but we have to realise politics is not about evil and crazy, it’s about real human communication. I do believe that going back to human communication, back to old school communication a little bit would make a lot of difference in people’s perspective on human beings condition today, and current political situation.
“I’ve often thought that maybe there is a certain hormone in human beings that we can only produce it when we are face to face. And it’s the hormone of shame – it becomes absent when you are communicating on social media and you become worse than you are. We just invented this. We just invented social media, this is a new invention – we cannot really control it, and we are experiencing the childhood diseases of social media playing out in our democratic institutions….”
The one thing that used to feel good (to me, anyway) about the Iowa Caucus was that “grassroots, face to face, people trying to persuade each other, minds being changed, we are all playing a part in what happens to us” kind of sense that I got from watching it from afar. But with social media being what it is now, I suspect that even if candidates were more on the ground, listening, reflecting back what they hear to people in cafes who don’t serve Cobb Salads, etc., that the hyperbolic, reactive din of Facebook, Twitter, etc., would muddy the waters too much, anyway.
Anyway, still thinking and reflecting on what you wrote. I like your passion!
Very candid, very relatable.
Jeff, I wholeheartedly agree with your new blog, and definitely with the comments above. I am especially heartbroken about the recent caucus results though, because it was the first (and probably last) one that our Illinois born and raised son participated in. What a loss for grassroots democracy.
Great post Jeff. I felt a sense sadness come over me as I watched the chaos unfold on caucus night. As a long-time Iowan, I took great pride in our quirky process. For it to be undone by incompetence hurt because this is not what Iowa is about. Thanks for turning this into a lesson.