Ironic start to the democratic process

Jon Margolis, [1] once the Chicago Tribune's chief political reporter and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

We know more about the presidential campaign today than we did before last night’s Iowa caucuses.

We know that Mike Huckabee can get evangelical Christians to vote for him. We know that having the biggest and most expensive field organization, as Mitt Romney did, isn’t enough. We know that Hillary Clinton is nowhere near inevitable and that Barack Obama can play in the big leagues.

We just don’t know which candidates the people of Iowa really preferred.

Considering that what transpired was a political contest in a functioning democracy based on the principle that every person gets one vote, this is not an inconsequential deficiency.

Should it have been a bigger part of the story?

It isn’t that the Iowa caucuses are without their charms. The people who attend do take their responsibilities seriously. There is an intimacy to the whole process, among voters as well as between them and the candidates. A relatively un-known and under-financed candidate, as Huckabee proved again, can become a real factor in the campaign, can even become – as Jimmy Carter did – president. Thousands of ordinary folks join campaigns, learn about politics, become better citizens. To some extent, Iowa caucus-goers do the early vetting for the rest of the country, and by and large, they don’t do such a bad job of it.

Not to mention that it’s nigh on to impossible to go to an actual caucus and not be impressed, even moved. Here is politics at its grass-rootsiest – carpenters and doctors, teachers and cops, insurance salesmen and students all together in a high school gym, earnestly debating, cajoling, deliberating, negotiating. It’s fun.

It just isn’t very democratic.

We don’t know which candidates the voters of Iowa preferred because so few of those voters took part. Yes, there were more than ever before – an estimated 239,000 Democrats and 114,000 Republicans. That record turnout means something. But there are more than 2 million voting age Iowans; by most standards, 11 percent is a paltry turnout.

OK, most of those who stayed home made their own political decision, arguably as valid as any other. They decided to stay home. But many an Iowan would have gone had he or she not been working. Caucuses have no absentee ballots; you have to show up in person. That’s nigh on to impossible for cops, waitresses, security guards and gas station attendants who pull the night shift, for nursing home residents who can’t find a driver, for soldiers at Fort Hood or in Iraq. That’s a lot of disenfranchised folks

However few they may have been, at least those who are Republicans actually voted, and we know how many voted for each candidate. It was a straight-up straw poll.

We don’t know exactly how the Democrats voted. We never will, and if nothing else, reporters should stop saying (as most of the morning show television hosts were) that Obama got 38 percent of the vote.

He did not. He got 38 percent of the delegates to the county conventions, which will choose delegates to congressional district conventions, which will choose delegates to the state convention, which will choose delegates to next summer’s Democratic National Convention.

Thanks to the singular procedures of these caucuses, that delegate count does not precisely reflect the real preferences of the caucusing Democrats. That’s because if a voter’s first choice candidate attracted fewer than 15 percent of the folks at the caucus, said candidate was not “viable,” and those voters could either go home or join the forces of their second-choice candidate.

That’s what happened. In most precincts, supporters of Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd or Dennis Kucinich didn’t meet the viability threshold. Those supporters went elsewhere, and both common sense and rumblings from Iowa indicate that they went to Obama or John Edwards. They did not go to Hillary Clinton.

So Obama’s (and perhaps Edwards’) delegate total quite likely exceeds – and Clinton’s understates – their actual support among the voters before they made their second choices.

Furthermore, all caucuses are not created equal. Delegates are apportioned according to a complex formula, which, among other things, gives rural areas more clout than the cities. The Des Moines caucus featured on C-Span attracted 375 Democrats who were to choose six delegates. In some tiny towns, three or four people went to caucuses that each elected a delegate to its county convention.

One person, one vote? Not even close.

Worse, some of these votes might be … well, bribed is too strong a word. Maybe intimidated is too strong a word. Let’s just say influenced.

There is no secret ballot in the Iowa caucuses, especially for Democrats. The Republicans  scribble the name of their favorite candidate on a slip of paper and drop it in a box or someone’s hat. Not exactly the secure privacy of a voting booth, but at least each Republican voter doesn’t have to declare a preference for the world to see, and then stand around discussing it in full view.

The Democrats do, supporters of the different candidate’s assembling in assigned sections of the room while monitors count to see who is viable and who gets how many delegates. So every voter is advertising his or her political preference to the neighbors, to their kid’s teacher or the parents of the kids that they teach, to their boss, maybe even to an ex-spouse. Why some Iowan has not written a novel based on the caucuses (“Murder at the Precinct Caucus”) is one of the great mysteries of our time.

Because it’s all out in the open and because all the onlookers live in the neighborhood, the likelihood of out-and-out intimidation is small. But subtle, even subconscious, intimidation is likely. If you were in Richardson’s non-viable corner last night and had to decide between Clinton and Obama, would the fact that your boss was standing there in the Clinton corner not help you make up your mind?

Then there was the caucus I went to in Des Moines in 1984. Alan Cranston was not viable. One of his supporters, a young man in a black turtleneck shirt, kept gazing fondly at one of the Walter Mondale supporters, a comely young woman wearing a red sweater. They seemed to have known each other. She walked over to the Cranston corner. There was some earnest discussion. There was a good deal of eyelid fluttering. I do not know what happened later that night, but if you’re going to write that novel and have any imagination at all, you can use this account as the setting for a really steamy scene.

What I do know is that he went over to the Mondale corner.

The purpose here is not to pry into anyone’s personal life; it is to make the point that the Iowa caucuses, gateway though they may be into the human soul, are too un-democratic to have as much power as they do in the most important political event in the world’s most important democracy. Somebody ought to point this out.

That somebody would be political journalists, who, for the most part, have not. In the past week or so, columns by David Broder [2]in the Washington Post and Gail Collins [3]in the New York Times raised questions about (or ridiculed) the process. The Times had a front-page story about all the disenfranchised Iowans. But there has been precious little explanation of how the Iowa process tends to distort, if not pervert, the campaign.

Perhaps Obama would have won a primary among those same 239,000 voters. But not by as much. There would have been countable percentages for Dodd and Biden. The top three would have been bunched more closely, maybe almost a three-way tie, with Clinton quite possibly coming in second.

We would have a different contest today. The “spin” would have been more ambiguous, more “Democratic Donnybrook” than “Obama Rules.”

Perhaps this caveat should be part of the story, but it’s hard to blame anybody for its absence. The job of the political reporter is not to prescribe but to describe. We don’t create the process; the political parties and the state legislatures do. If the people of Iowa, through their elected officials, wanted to hold a primary election in which many more people would vote, they could. The reporter’s message to political and public officials is, and has to be: You decide. We report.

Not to mention that no reporter is going to prepare a front-page story or a segment for the top of the evening news with a fourth paragraph saying “this event shouldn’t be taken as seriously as it is.” If that doesn’t defy human nature, it surely defies journalistic instincts, especially because – let’s face it – covering the Iowa caucuses is fun. It was even fun back in the early ’80s before Des Moines had any good restaurants. It’s a big party with your friends, and you do get on page one a lot.

And in a sense, the shortcomings of the Iowa caucuses grew gradually, and it’s hard to see gradual changes, especially when you’re immersed in the nitty-gritty.

Iowa’s caucuses became a big deal in 1976, when Jimmy Carter parlayed his strong showing in them to win the nomination. But there are two big differences between then and now. There was no all-day cable news enhancing the importance of celebrity and trivia in presidential politics. And the primary season lasted longer. The New Hampshire primary was more than a month later than the Iowa caucuses that year, and the nomination contests went on until early June when California and New Jersey voted. There was some time for voters to ponder, to reconsider. If your state voted in April or May, you had time to think about what had been done in February and March and choose to endorse, or to reject, those earlier decisions.

This year, the New Hampshire primary is any minute. OK, it’s next Tuesday. What’s the difference? And California, New Jersey and just about every place else votes by Feb.  5. There’s no time to consider, much less reconsider.

All this diminishes the pluses of the Iowa caucuses – their intimacy, the role they play in bringing citizens into the political process – and augments their anti-democratic distortions. Pointing that out – not just a day or two before caucus night but throughout the process – should have been part of the job. It wouldn’t have been an easy thing to do, but then “easy” (unlike “fun”) was never part of the job description.