Perhaps because the nominations still seem so much in the air, the Iowa caucus is receiving an unusual amount of criticism on procedural grounds. Some, but not all of this is fair. First this from Christopher Hitchens at Slate:
It is quite astonishing to see with what deadpan and neutral a tone our press and television report the open corruption—and the flagrantly anti-democratic character—of the Iowa caucuses.
It is quite true that the Iowa caucuses are undemocratic. That is precisely because it is a partisan affair. Caucuses and primaries are not supposed to reflect the will of the majority; they are supposed to express the will of the parties. When the Greens, Libertarians, Communists, and Transcendental meditation adherents choose their candidates, they don't have to care what the rest of us think. Unless, of course, they want to have some effect on the outcome. But that is a pragmatic matter, and has nothing to do with legitimacy.
Hitchens' subtitle, "The Undemocratic Caucuses are a Terrible Way to Choose a Presidential Candidate" compounds the error. Iowa is not choosing a Presidential candidate. It is choosing delegates to the national convention. The convention will choose the candidate.
Second, the Iowa caucuses are criticized because they are a terrible way to select delegates for the national convention. This point is made by Mickey Kaus, also in Slate:
Letting the presidential nominee be picked by the Iowa caucusers is like letting your antiwar tactics be picked by the last people left at the end of a 4-hour SDS meeting in 1970. The result: the leftist radicals win! [But you were all leftist radicals. It was an SDS meeting--ed Oh, right. I mean, the most committed partisans who have nothing better to do with their time win! In Iowa these people are proven fools, remember.]
This strikes me as correct, but the problem here is precisely that the procedure is too democratic. Originally caucuses were just party meetings, open to activists and power brokers. Such folks were reasonably good at balancing party principles and objectives with political reality. That was the system that gave us Abraham Lincoln. The Iowa system opens the doors to the smoke-filled room (no doubt tobacco free in most or all places today) to pretty much anyone, but only for one night. I suspect it does have the effect that Kaus complains about.
Third, the Iowa caucus is criticized because it does not accurately predict who will win the election or even the nomination. This is the point of my inestimable Keloland colleague, Todd Epp.
In nine election cycles, it was dead wrong 1/3d of the time—it picked neither nominee. It picked both nominees only 2/9ths of the time in years where there wasn’t an incumbent running—1976 and 2004—only 2/9ths of the time.
Todd's point is not that there is anything wrong with Iowans voting they way they vote, but that there is no reason the rest of us should take their choices so seriously. I haven't analyzed his numbers but I certainly agree with this argument, which should probably worry him. The point of the caucus system, like the primaries, is for voters to choose who they want to win, not for them to guess who will win.
There is a fourth criticism: that it gives the people of Iowa too much power over the nominating process. I think Todd Epp's piece puts this to rest. Iowa has power, briefly, only over the news industry. After Thursday, the carbon footprint of Iowa will shrink as all the famous faces crowd back into first class seats on the flights out of Des Moines.
People who are willing to invest more of their time and resources in the political process can have a disproportionate impact of that process. This is undemocratic, but it's also perfectly fair and very difficult to correct for. The two valid criticisms of the Iowa caucus are 1) it's a bad way for for Iowans to chose delegates to the national convention, and 2) it's bad that this process consumes so much national attention at this point in the election cycle. On the first point, since Iowa isn't going back to the old smoke filled room, it should probably go to a primary election. Primaries have at least one virtue: they give us some real idea of the public support for the various candidates.
On the second point, the only corrective is to re-engineer the nomination process to remove Iowa's ridiculously inflated celebrity. I have long been advocating a system of rotating primaries. I note that USAToday has decided to join me.
If political parties made New Year's resolutions, a worthy one would be to end this absurdity by devising a system of rotating regional primaries that would be in place by 2012.
A more diverse and varied system for selecting nominees would help both parties, improve the public policy debate and make voters less cynical. It would also allow more people to share in the privilege of being first.
I have favored dividing states into an order of five or six groups, with a mix of regions and state sizes in each group, and with a new group moving to the top of the cue (say, the first Tuesday of January) at each election. An alternative would be to divide the states by regions, with New England going first in 2012, and then the Southwest in 2016, etc. In either case a lottery would determine the order.
For now, we have to face the inescapable fact. Today is the first day of the rest of the election.
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