Some final thoughts about the Iowa Caucuses

(FUN FACT: In Iowa, there are six times as many pigs as people.)

Rick Perry ought to get a grip. His sour grapes about the "distorted" caucus process and how he is looking forward to participating in an "actual primary" miss the point. The reason for his lack of success wasn't the shortcomings of the process. It was the shortcomings of the candidate.

I caught Letterman's extended snark about Iowa and the caucuses last night. He has got to be the most snottily elitist Indiana boy in the world, and he's not even funny anymore. Regrettably, he continued his rude and not particularly clever crusade against "Michele Obachman" even after she withdrew from the race- a withdrawal from which he derived a "Top Ten List" that even the studio audience didn't find funny. The media should be ashamed of the way they treated Ms. Bachmann this year; for her part, she handled their childish snideness with style and grace.

By the way, somebody ought to tell Letterman, Jon Huntsman, and all the others who have been suggesting that Iowa's record in picking presidents has been less than stellar that since Jimmy Carter's 1976 first brought the Iowa Caucuses to national attention, only in 1988 and 1992 has anyone of either party been elected president without finishing first in the Iowa Caucuses (though Carter technically finished second to Uncommitted, he finished first among the actual candidates). New Hampshire, on the other hand, failed to pick the eventual president in 1988, 2000 and 2008.

New Hampshire picks its nose. Iowa picks presidents.

Brian Williams pointed out that you could fit all the people who participated in the caucuses into the Dallas Cowboys stadium. He and the other Eastern elitists continue to miss the point, just as Aaron Sorkin did in devoting an entire West Wing episode to dissing the Iowa Caucuses. We may no longer have the highest literacy rate in the nation, or the best schools, or the highest percentage of our population who are college graduates. But we're still close to the top in all those categories. And more than that, we're a remarkably well-informed state, as states go, where national issues are concerned. The caucuses have made us this way, and it enables us to serve a unique and valuable function in the nominating process.

Iowa may well be the largest state in which retail politics is still the norm. This year the degree to which the campaign was an "air war," depending on TV ads and sound-bites, was unprecedented. But the success of Rick Santorum, who fought the battle with little money and only a few ads at the end, proves that the traditional Iowa way of campaigning still works. And you just can't do it in New York or California or Illinois or Pennsylvania. They're just too big. Yes, it's the fact that you can fit the caucus participants into the Dallas Cowboys stadium that makes it possible.

Here in Iowa, on behalf of all the other folks in the nation, we are able to look the candidates in the eye, to engage them in conversations about the concerns of ordinary, every day Americans, to ask them questions, to hold them personally accountable, and to take their measure, one-on-one. We've become quite good at that. It's made us inform ourselves. It's made us prepare. That, together with our relatively small size, makes it possible for us to do this, and to do it better than it could be done elsewhere.

No, we aren't the biggest state- though we are, as Mary Matlin commented on caucus night, "the swingingest of the swing states." Iowa's six electoral votes could go either way in November, and that gives us a certain importance, especially given how close this election will probably be. But it's only six electoral votes. Nor are we the most demographically diverse state. We're not quite as white as the media coverage has implied, but our minority population is small compared to those of, say, New York or California or Illinois or Florida or Virginia or New Mexico or a whole bunch of other states.

But those things aren't the point. The point is that this is the place where ordinary Americans can hold the candidates personally accountable and share our conclusions with our fellow citizens. Take them for what they're worth. But we find ourselves in a unique position to do it, and to do it well- and I think the process is better off for it, the jealousy of less well-positioned states who envy our opportunity to offer it aside.

True, all the attention (as well as our collective level of education and the responsibility our first in the naion status has placed on us to inform ourselves) have made us one of the most ideologically polarized states in the country. To be honest, I myself tend to be concerned, as I've said before in this blog, about the degree to which Republicans have to appeal to the crazy Right in order to win in Iowa, and Democrats have to reach out to the equally crazy Left. But the one candidate in the race this year who can fairly be called an extremist- Ron Paul- finished third in a six candidate race (well, OK. Maybe Michelle Bachmann and sometimes Rick Perry. But they finished fifth and sixth). And the winner was not only the most moderate candidate, but the strongest potential nominee. Despite the fact that Iowa Republicans would generally rather be Right than elect a president, this year the result was driven by electability. That speaks well of the ability of the Hawkeye State to moderate even its penchant for ideological crusades.

Newt Gingrich served his country well as speaker. He won't be its president, but one side-effect of the strangely thin-skinned though aggressive Ron Paul's attacks on Newt will apparently be a determination on the former speaker's part to subject Paul for the very first time ever to the kind of scrutiny the more serious candidates had to face in Iowa. To the extent that people pay attention to the New Hampshire debates, whatever little credibility Paul has will not survive them.

Somebody should have told PBS that this was the Republican caucuses. I briefly turned to Gwen Ifill and crew as the returns were coming in, and was regaled by an extended discussion of the race from the Democratic point of view, including an interview with the chair of the DNC spinning like mad to make a case that somehow the results were bad for Mitt Romney. You can tell who she's afraid of, anyway. Hopefully, the snippet of the coverage I saw wasn't representative- though it did seem to go on for quite a while.

Finally, I hope Iowans learn from Rick Santorum. Retail politics does work in Iowa- and it's the fact that it works so uniquely well here that provides the whole justification for paying attention to the Iowa Caucuses in the first place.