The Sydney Morning Herald
Stir corn syrup and vitriol, and you might find the next US president
By Simon Mann
It is an odd first stop in the months-long trek to the presidential nomination.
Iowa, renowned as much for its corn as for its first-in-the-nation referendum on presidential aspirants, is small, sparsely populated and hardly representative of the 50-member union that is the United States.
Iowa is whitebread America, where just 3 per cent of the population of 3 million is African-American or Latino, where the crime rate holds low and where a farming boom has delivered above average incomes in a nation battling harsh economic times.
In this socially conservative mid-western state, American life is at its temperate best, in metaphorical contrast to Iowa's midwinter freeze, during which January's day-time temperature barely nudges zero.
But on Tuesday (Wednesday, Sydney time), as many as 200,000 Iowans in 1784 precincts can be expected to brave the chill and head to their church hall, public library or community centre, perhaps even to a neighbour's place, to engage in one of the more eccentric rituals in America's democracy.
The Iowa caucuses, which gather up the politically minded in hundreds of groups that can number as few as a dozen people, will rubber-stamp Barack Obama as the Democratic Party's undisputed champion, while offering little more than a first impression of the seven main Republican contenders vying for the right to challenge him in 2012.
In their groups, registered Republicans will debate each other and listen to the surrogates and representatives of the candidates before being handed a blank slip of paper on which to record their preference for president.
Opinion polls cite the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the Texas congressman Ron Paul and the erstwhile speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich as the three most likely to emerge triumphant out of a bruising weeks-long battle in which the contenders have spent millions of dollars beating up on each other in vitriolic attack ads run in the local media.
But Texas governor Rick Perry, too, has raised a war-chest and campaigners for Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania, are laying claim to a last-minute surge of support.
Traditionally, the results can be misleading, despite Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann's confidence that Iowa Republicans will next week choose America's next president. Her candidacy looks to be sinking faster than Obama's popularity.
Winning in Iowa does not guarantee a party's nomination, let alone the presidency, any more than losing the caucuses denies it, although an extremely poor showing in the Hawkeye State can end a campaign. In fact, no Republican who was walloped in Iowa in the past 30 years has gone on to become president.
Less volatile have been Democratic contests. In the last three, the winner in Iowa went on to get the party's nod, while Bill Clinton's Houdini act, after placing fourth in 1992 with just 3 per cent of the Iowa vote, gives succour to trailing candidates such as Jon Huntsman. The former Utah governor and ambassador to China, who has given Iowa a wide berth to campaign elsewhere, on Thursday said: ''They pick corn in Iowa and pick presidents here in New Hampshire.''
Truth is, although the candidates in Iowa are vying for the pledges of just 28 delegates - little more than 1 per cent of the total who will attend the party's national convention in Tampa Bay, Florida, in August - they know a strong showing will bring their campaign momentum and money, and that the media preoccupation guarantees it.
''The name of the presidential nominating game is perception, and the reality of the Iowa precinct caucuses has long been replaced by the media perception,'' Professor Hugh Winebrenner, of Iowa's Drake University, has argued. ''It is not the caucus event per se but the media report of the event that shapes the presidential selection process.''
The four-yearly rush of media unlikely ruffles Iowans who will rug up again next week to continue a tradition that has endured since the 1840s.
Unlike a primary contest, which entertains a straight-out vote, Iowans' pitch for president is unbinding, with responsibility for choosing the nominee passed through a string of conventions at county and state level. Iowa's delegation to the national convention won't be settled until mid-2012, by which time an alternative candidate may have stitched up the nomination.
That process makes Iowa's choice somewhat loose, even hypothetical. Last time, Huckabee topped Iowa's caucuses with 34 per cent of the vote, but McCain had stitched up the nomination before Iowa had completed its process. Instead, its delegates fell into line at the national convention, adding their voice to that of the victorious McCain camp.
What Iowa can take responsibility for is winnowing the field of candidates - or for shaking an assumed frontrunner out of complacency. A candidate who fails to get traction in this first-up contest has little time to regroup before facing New Hampshire voters in another week, and South Carolina and Florida within the month.
''If Bachmann and Santorum don't do significantly better than expected in Iowa, their campaigns for all practical purposes will end,'' noted Bill Galston, a member of the Clinton administration who is a resident scholar at the Brookings Institution.
But a poor showing for Perry, whose popularity soared over summer before his memorable ''oops'' moment, when his mind went blank during one of the 11 televised debates so far, might not mean curtains. ''He'll probably have enough left in the bank to continue, but with poor prospects of success,'' said Galston.
While money can prolong the weakest of candidacies, changes to Republican rules also stand to lengthen the process this time. Having eliminated the ''winner-takes-all'' rule for many early primaries, candidates will now be allotted delegates proportionally, according to the percentage of vote they garner.
The total number of delegates up for grabs early on has been reduced further because of penalties imposed on those states that shuffled their primary dates in defiance of the Republican National Committee.
Consequently, just 345 of the 1143 delegates needed to clinch the nomination will be allocated in the first 11 contests before Super Tuesday on March 6.
Republican observer David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, believes the changes could result in a series of closely split primaries that prolongs the contest. He divines a silver lining for Republicans.
''The extension of the primary calendar could very easily be a good thing for the eventual Republican nominee,'' he said recently. ''The minute a presumptive nominee is crowned, the White House and its allies will have a single target on which to focus their vitriol. But, as long as the primary process is in play, the optics of partisan attack get more complicated, if not harder.''
The downside of a prolonged encounter could be self-inflicted wounds - expensive and escalating infighting - that could damage the future nominee. That possibility is being magnified in part by last year's Supreme Court decision that relaxed rules on campaign donations, inviting parallel spending by supporters.
''The ads are more negative than they were in 2007,'' Dianne Bystrom, a political communication professor at Iowa State University, told CNN this week. ''In part, it's the mood of the country, which has certainly darkened in the last four years.''
The increasingly ugly contest offers a glimpse of the likely battlefront in the presidential race proper. For now, Romney is being characterised by his own as a flip-flopper whose move to jettison past support for abortion, gay marriage and cap and trade laws, as well as abandoning a crackdown on guns, is viewed by conservatives with deep suspicion. That's not to mention his greatest millstone, the healthcare reform that he introduced in Massachusetts that Obama claimed as a model for his much-reviled (by Republicans) federal scheme.
Meanwhile, Gingrich, a pro-Romney ad says, ''has more baggage than the airlines'' - confessed infidelity, a consultancy that reaped millions from the ill-fated Freddie Mac mortgage business and previous support for Obama's green laws. And then there is Perry, who wins kudos for his state's economic record, but stands accused of populist anti-intellectualism, rejecting science in favour of fables.
Which leaves the 76-year-old Paul, ''all bone and sinew and nervous energy … hunched and herky-jerky in too-large suits,'' according to one New York Times writer, whose well-drilled and enthusiastic base has quietly saturated Iowa in recent months, leading their man to the top of a number of polls.
Increasingly, the Republican establishment has trained its guns on the obstetrician and long-time congressman, anxious that a Paul win in Iowa could diminish the state's claim on the nation's first-up ballot.
Paul's libertarian views sit well outside the Republican mainstream, but his anti-war message and isolationist foreign policy seemingly appeal to younger votes, in particular.
As the threat of a Paul win has increased, so too have the attacks. Gingrich cites Paul's call to cut all US foreign aid, including to Israel, as lunacy; Bachmann is bashing Paul as ''dangerous'' for having a hands-off foreign policy; Perry says he is naive about threats from Iran. ''Ron Paul would be a dangerous president,'' he insisted this week. ''He would have us ignore all of the warning signs of another brutal dictator who wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. I won't. He would wait until one of our cities is wiped off of the map until he reacted. I won't wait.''
At the same time, attention has again turned to newsletters distributed under Paul's name in the 1990s that appeared to align him with extreme right groups, accused Martin Luther King of having ''seduced under-age girls and boys'' and said of homosexuals: ''I miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.''
http://www.smh.com.au/world/stir-corn-syrup-and-vitriol-and-you-might-find-the-next-us-president-20111230-1pfjz.html
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