The Iowa Caucus: Keep It In Perspective

From all the media coverage and analysis and opinion polls every 5 minutes, you'd think the Iowa Caucus coming up on February 1st was a genuinely significant and predictive event.  Not so much.  It's influence is greatly exaggerated and it's last two GOP winners were Mike Huckabee in '08 and Rick Santorum in '12.  All it really is, mainly, is first.

But the Iowa Caucus is still a weird and amusing process.  Here's what Buster had to say about it back in August 2011:
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"The candidate we support is so unpopular,
we didn't even get chairs."

The Caucus is another Hawkeye oddity where the Party faithful enter a gymnasium, stand in clusters representing "support" for each candidate, and try to convince those in other clusters to change their support by moving to a different candidate's group. They talk and mill around and change horses until time is called. It's Cluster-Fuck Musical Chairs! Oh, those Iowans! 

One last thought on the way we play these games: There are well over 300 million people in the United States. Iowa is a rural state with 3 million residents, 90% of whom are Caucasian. New Hampshire is a rural state with a population of 1.3 million, 92% of whom are white. By contrast, California has 37 million people of every sort. Yet in our Presidential primary process, Iowa and New Hampshire have much more influence than California. Just sayin'.