Well, here we are a week away from the Iowa caucus and the madcap bus tours through acres of semi-frozen corn fields have begun in earnest. Soon, all across the state in musty church basements, damp and chilled citizens of Iowa, redolent with the odor of wet tweed, will be gathering – all 120,000 of them – and in a merciless but quick exercise in deranged democracy they will winnow the republican field by half in the course of 24 hours. And as much as I loathe the republican candidates, this seems manifestly unfair.
To think that the 5% or so of the citizens of a woebegone state like Iowa, who are crazy enough to drag themselves to the self-hypnosis of caucus meetings, will doom campaigns that have been in full flight since the day after Obama was sworn in is surreal in a Norman Rockwell on mushrooms kind of way. The candidates clearly recognize that this is the first of a short series of “moments-of-truth” to occur over the next 30 days, after which anyone with a lick of sense not in the top three will be home nursing their wounds over a bottle of Patron and a handful of pharmaceuticals, so they are feverishly busing themselves around the state to hastily arranged meetings in doughnut shops and Applebees banquet rooms, begging for votes and trying to convince the shivering primary voters that they and they alone are the true conservative amongst the Gang of Six.
Michele Bachman, in a crazed and manic version of a 12th century quest, is busing herself from one corner of the state to another, and at each stop she hops off the bus muttering the same applause lines about small government, the real America, God’s divine mission and usually anything else that pops into her addled brain. Somehow she has been convinced – or has convinced herself – that traveling to all 99 Iowa counties – counties like Osceola, Audubon, Taylor, combined population under 20,000 people – is a better use of her time than being strategic and going where the people are. Maybe there’s a point to be made about being “one of us” and understanding the common man. But really – when you’re polling about 6% of expected voters it’s not a spiritual quest anymore; it’s a simple numbers game. She has to try to convince enough people that she’s not nuts to grow that number to around 20% to have a chance of even having enough gas to get her tour bus to New Hampshire and she really has no chance there in any case. I’ll miss her but I think she should lay in some lemons and salt and go home to the land of 10,000 lakes.
Rick “I know about corn, too” Perry is also desperately flogging a dying horse, peddling soft focus commercials where he speaks in the drawling and sincere voice of a child molester around a campfire, selling himself as some kind of outsider champion of average folks and trying hard to make people forget his dim-witted debate performances, semi-ethical exploitation of a Texas government pension loophole to “retire” and collect his pension while still in office as governor and at the same time billing the citizens of Texas a zillion dollars so his spur-wearing security detail can hit every Hooters between Des Moines and the Mississippi River with a stash of Cristal in the back of their shiny black secret agent Suburbans. He is polling around 10% and looks like this may not be his last stand but he can definitely anticipate heading back to Austin to wade into the stinking graft suck hole he’s created over the last two terms and back to the business of influence peddling where he can use his meager skills most efficiently.
The other Rick – social Taliban Rick Santorum – is also frantically swimming upstream even though he has earlier done the “every single county” tour, obviously to no avail, and increasingly finds himself standing forlornly in front of ever smaller crowds who seemed to have decided he smells like an “also ran” and would rather work on their knitting or update their Facebook page and wait for the next candidate than listen to him prattle on about gay marriage, his ability to conceive children and how his faith sustains him in his hatred and disdain for young women who would deem to have an abortion or even have sex before marriage. This last comment inevitably causes smirking sidelong glances among small town residents who’ve known each other for years and probably spent their adolescence teaching each other naughty things in the hayloft of the barn out back.
It is interesting that all three of these soon-to-be losers started out obviously trying hard to appeal to the then surging tea party rabble who had only recently been credited with the November 2010 mid-term massacre and looked to be the new power in the republican party – the Goldwater to the old line party elites’ Rockefeller. But for now the tea party’s influence has waned and riding their coat tails is looking like a losing proposition rather than a limo ride to electoral Easy Street.
No, it looks as if next Tuesday will be a watershed day in spite of the paucity of actually human activity. In all likelihood, Newt and Mitt and probably Racist Ron Paul will come away from Iowa smelling only vaguely of barnyard waste while the other three will carry the reek of doom and abject failure. I will miss them for their sheer inept insanity but am willing to sacrifice for the good of the republic. Just as Newt committed adultery because he loved his country so very, very much, I will accept the loss of a portion of my comedic muses so that our children have a better life than ours.
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