Kooky caucus chaos
My guess Tuesday morning, as I join the rest of you in living without any returns from the utter nonsense of the Iowa Democratic caucuses the night before, is that a major political story has gone unreported.
It’s that Joe Biden crashed in Iowa like a bad phone app.
It’s that a theme of electability is highly inconvenienced by finishing fourth or maybe even fifth in Iowa behind the gay mayor of South Bend, a socialist, a candidate who has been fading ever since she started putting the zeroes and commas to her Medicare-for-all plan and possibly even the excellent running-mate-in-waiting that is Amy Klobuchar.
Social media is awash in individual reports of outcomes at scores of precincts. Either Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren leads in all of them.
Buttigieg, anxious for someone to know he did well, put out his internal memo of his campaign’s monitoring of the caucuses that had him at 25 percent, which would at least seem good enough for second place.
Sanders had more caucus-goers than anyone, but they tended to be bunched up in college towns. Buttigieg had more consistent support statewide. Among other epic failings is that the Iowa caucus works like the electoral college, with college towns representing California. People don’t matter; geographic subdivisions do.
Biden led in no caucuses that I saw reported, and in some cases, achieved no “viability,” meaning he couldn’t get 15 percent of caucus-goers to stand for him.
His wife tried entirely too hard to beam as he gave a tepid and typically faltering speech to supporters.
Then his campaign put out a statement from lawyers complaining about the Iowa Democratic Party vote-counting failures. They’d like to keep the epic Iowa systemic fail as the story, rather than that Iowa wasn’t buying the passive electability he was selling.
Then Joe’s deputy campaign manager said the integrity of Iowa’s returns would be forever in question, which is not what you say when you did well.
Then his campaign put out some new endorsements and invoked the dreaded “long haul.”
Among the new endorsers of Biden were the Pryors of Arkansas—David and Mark, who, as modern national Democratic influences, are nice guys.
And Klobuchar was smiling and cracking wise, meaning either she was newly energized or saying to hell with it, and it didn’t seem to be the latter.
All-white Iowa should never have had such singular faux-prominence.
The public voting of a town hall-styled caucus process in which sheer numbers don’t proportionately convert to delegates is a flawed concept and much-worse practice. It needs to be shelved entirely for simple primaries starting somewhere other than Iowa, and surely now will be.
Maybe Arkansas could go first. We actually have African American voters. I confidently guarantee that our state Democratic Party, such as it is, could count votes as well as Iowa’s Democratic Party.
Yes, I may have to do a hasty rewrite if and when numbers are revealed later today. But I’m thinking I won’t.
I’m thinking it’s a dissipated split decision with Buttigieg, Sanders, Warren and Klobuchar encouraged; with Joe revealed and left mainly to rely on black voters in South Carolina on Feb. 29, and with Mike Bloomberg thinking it’s good for him that Joe crashed but he hadn’t expected Buttigieg and Klobuchar to still be around to bother his millions with moderate and center-left votes on Super Tuesday.
The story likely will remain that it turns out there was a good reason Biden melted down in two previous runs for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The real winner of the Iowa Democratic caucuses is the man who loves and lives by chaos.
That bloviator-in-chief also won, by the way, the Iowa Republican caucus on Monday. They managed to get those votes counted. Unanimity is easier math, although two GOP caucus-goers stood up to vote for Mitt Romney—and got roundly booed by the MAGA cult.
Iowa was just kind of a hoot Monday night, wasn’t it?