Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Iowa caucuses, New Hampshire, the Republican Party and The King of Hearts


A repristic shibboleth of sorts. I’m just saying…

January 11, 2012

The King of Hearts

Kevin E. Dayhoff

It is fairly well accepted among keen observers of national politics that the Iowa caucuses of Tuesday a week ago are much more about political and media-theater than a prognosticator of who will vie for the Oval Office this fall.

As one political pundit put it, you pick corn in Iowa; you pick the next president in New Hampshire. Maybe so – maybe not. I’d rather look at Iowa as a political combine – a soulless machine that separates the wheat from the chaff.

Above and beyond the not-too-small matter that the January 3rd caucus is a win-win moneymaking machine for Iowa, the political opera is otherwise literally, repristically, heuristically, and metaphorically a brutal threshing and winnowing process.

First the candidates are milled and pounded and then thrown in the air. The chaff – the lightweights and the also-rans – are then ground into dust and blown off to the side to be plowed back into the earth.

Yet Iowa in 2008 was an anomaly of sorts. In the January 3, 2008, Democratic Party caucuses… http://www.thetentacle.com/ShowArticle.cfm?mydocid=4852