And let’s pray it finally pops this unwieldly whitehead on the face of American democracy.
A night that was supposed to bring clarity to the Democratic presidential contest turned into a long ordeal of confusion and delays on Monday, as the Iowa Democratic Party failed to report results from more than a handful of precincts for hours after the state’s famed caucuses began. …
Struggling to adopt a new byzantine process of tabulating results … Troy Price, the Iowa Democratic Party chairman, said results would not begin to be released until sometime on Tuesday.
(The New York Times, February 4, 2020)
Frankly, some of us have been warning for years that launching the race for the Democratic nomination in Iowa is rather like holding the Winter Olympics in Jamaica. Yeah, there will be glitches, man.
Here in part is how I added my two cents’ worth in “Iowa Caucuses: Much Ado About Nothing,” January 4, 2012:
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Respected media critic Howard Kurtz, host of the CNN program Reliable Sources, summed up this pointless and misleading exercise in a January 2 Daily Beast commentary, ‘Iowa Caucuses Are as Distorted as a Funhouse Mirror’. Specifically, he posed the question every sane political observer poses around this time every four years, namely:
Why, then, does Iowa — a state far whiter and more rural than most of America — get to play such an outsize role?
Indeed – but to comment any further would be to participate in the obvious insanity this kickoff to every presidential election has become.
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In any event, Pete Buttigieg might have won the right to be the eventual winner not only of these botched caucuses but of the entire nomination process. This, because he had the presence of mind to stand above the chaos, declare victory, and move on to New Hampshire.
Meanwhile, nobody should care what results Iowa organizers finally get around to publishing later today … or whenever.
But the first thing the new Democratic nominee should do is fire the entire leadership of the Democratic National Committee. They should give the new leaders a mandate to revamp the nomination process, ensuring that it’s fairer, which, ironically enough, will likely result in Iowa going from “first in the nation” to last to hold its … caucuses primary. No more caucuses of Caucasians causing chaos for the rest of us!
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