A dissrevice to Iowa

For most newspaper-reading folk, the highly-anticipated Iowa Caucuses on January 3 sure sound important.  For the GOP candidates for president, they surely are.

But why?

No offense, Iowans, but the more attention these delegate selection caucuses get, the less they mean to me.  Moreover, the Iowa I know from living next-door in Wisconsin (and having organized caravans of College Republicans to cross the Mississippi to campaign for Iowa Republican candidates) is barely recognizable in the heat of this particular winter.  From the coverage in national news outlets, Iowa sounds like it's full of narrow-minded people who will render an especially harsh judgement on the fate of each GOP candidate.

In the Iowa I remember, pork roasts and farm dinners were happy affairs that joined like-minded conservatives in the excitement of grass-roots politics.  On TV, it's as though the GOP candidates are bowing to Ku Klux Klan, or at least the evangelical wing of such, in order to prove their purity and chastity.  But, I digress, dear Iowa; all this is not of your making.  No, the blame goes to none other than the candidates themselves.

True, perhaps Iowa is more conservative or more "family values" than other places, but to watch the GOP primary boil down to pandering to what its candidates think Iowans want does Iowa a bad deed.  While it's understood that a loss in Iowa will end the campaigns of Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann, and I understand how hard it must be for a candidate to have, essentially, a one-state strategy, their recent statements have begun to make me wonder just how much, deep down, they actually hate Iowans.

When Mr. Santorum treads water proclaiming the size of his family and his political purity on social issues makes him the only logical choice for Iowans, he is discounting their intelligence.  When Mrs. Bachmann insists that her simpleton's meshing of scripture with the US Constitution makes her a better president, Iowans are smart enough to cringe, too.

Coalition politics is not the same as party politics and is twice-removed from governing.  Iowa might have tons of conservatives and simple folk to appeal to, but none of them are dumb or simple-minded.  Despite the economic boost from having so many politicians running around the state every four years, Iowans might consider what all this pandering-- or a particularly strong showing by Ron Paul in the caucuses-- does to its citizens' reputation.

It might be worth it for most Iowans to take a step back from being the first delegate-nominating state and let all the base pandering go on someplace else.  Then again, if I remember them, Iowans just don't give much thought to how they look to the rest of the country in the first place.