Monday, January 2, 2012

The idiocy of Iowa

I really don't understand the poll numbers that have been coming out of Iowa ahead of the caucuses there. Mitt Romney and Ron Paul are now close enough to each other to be within the margin of error, with Rick Santorum in third place, Newt Gingrich in fourth, and Rick Perry fifth.

I can see why Newt Gingrich might slide a bit in the polls, I have questioned for a while now how Newt could ever possibly maintain a lead in the polls for any great length of time.  But why would Ron Paul be gaining so much momentum?  I may have some libertarian tendencies, but there's no way I could ever vote for a guy who is crazy enough to toe Dennis Kucinich's line on foreign policy... his anti-semitic newsletters and flirtations with 9/11 trutherism aren't exactly sweetening the deal for me either.

And I'm constantly amazed at how well Mitt Romney always does in the polls.  The argument for nominating him is always that he is the most electable, but how electable will he really be once the media's long knives finally come out?  Romney's flip-flops already have much of his own party's base dissatisfied with him, but in the general election he would also be easily villified as a wealthy fat cat with a lousy record on job creation, and having Romneycare on his résumé will make it pretty much impossible for him to ever effectively campaign against Obamacare.

Another thing that bothers me, why on earth does Iowa always get the first say in our presidential elections?  Obama beat McCain in Iowa by a margin of at least ten points, so why should Republicans be looking to Iowa as the first state to whittle our field of candidates down?  I think it would make much more sense to give red states the first say in picking Republican candidates and blue states the first say in picking Democrat candidates, with states having the highest percentage of the vote for each party having the earliest scheduled primaries.  If we did things that way, the GOP primaries would begin in Oklahoma and end in Hawaii... and the Democrats would begin theirs in Hawaii and end in Wyoming.

Update: Ace is still trying to make the case for Rick Perry... I think he makes a pretty good case, but when a kook like Ron Paul has twice the poll numbers that Perry has, it probably doesn't matter at this point.  You can't reason someone out of a position that they never reasoned themselves into to begin with.

Update:  Thanks to the Watchers Council for the honorable mention.

Update:  Well, looks like Romney won in Iowa, but just barely,  I still don't get it... why do we start there?  What would the field look like right now if we were already talking about the results of the Oklahoma primary, and Iowa caucuses were still months away?

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