Summary: Last night’s Iowa caucuses were a fiasco for the Democratic Party. What should have been a simple, real-time exercise in tabulating caucus results turned into a cluster fuck of Mongolian proportions as vote totals were unaccountably and unacceptably delayed from numerous Iowa precincts. Already, conspiracy theories are swirling in every direction, and the chattering classes, together with some of the DNC, are beginning to wonder whether the vaunted first-in-the-Nation Iowa caucuses have outlived their usefulness.
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Cathedral City, February 4, 2020 — last night’s Democratic Iowa caucuses were an unmitigated fiasco. What should have been a simple, real-time exercise in counting and tabulating the results of the various caucuses around the State of Iowa became a clusterfuck of Mongolian proportions as vote totals were unaccountably and unacceptably delayed because of software glitches in various apps intended to speed up the transmission of results.
Nearly 24 hours after the hypertrophic, overly ballyhooed Iowa caucuses were supposed to come to an end, there is still no clear notion as to who the winner was.
Nonetheless, the results are available, the night appears to have gone far better than could have been expected for former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, the gay dude from Indiana with the almost unpronounceable surname. Indeed, according to available results, Buttigieg appears to have commanded more so-called delegate equivalents than the vaunted front runner, Independent Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders, who trails Buttigieg by a little bit less than two percentage points.
Given that the shtetl Stalinist has been campaigning in Iowa since he shivved Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign, Buttigieg’s surprisingly strong performance cannot be sitting well with Bernard Sanders or his campaign. Unconfirmed and sketchily sourced reporting has it that both the Independent Vermont Senator and his senior campaign staff are livid at the apparent trend in the numbers.
Of course, it must be remembered that Sanders and his senior staff, as well as most of his redeless followers have a rather divine right attitude of entitlement in any campaign in which Bernard Sanders is involved. Rather like Donald Trump, Bernard Sanders and his people tend to believe that victory is their birthright at anyone who does not “feel the bern” suffers from some kind of moral shortcoming that automatically deprives them of any right to have an opinion or a point of view.
As the results from the Iowa caucuses continue to trickle in, and it becomes ever more evident that a majority of Iowa Democratic caucus goers just don’t “feel the bern,” Sanders's redeless Twitter and Facebook followers have been fomenting all manner of conspiracy theories that Sanders himself, that sour, superannuated shtetl Stalinist, that loudmouth Leninist loser, that blowhard bloviating Burlington Bolshevik, was somehow “robbed” of victory in the Iowa caucuses because of some kind of nefarious conspiracy by and on behalf of Pete Buttigieg.
The Sanders conspiracy theory attacks targeting Mayor Pete are all the more reprehensible because they are so Trumpian in their tone and tenor. Though a lot of gay men are rather foolishly rallying behind Sanders, the tone on social media is full of dog whistle homophobia of which the queer nation ought to wake up and take notice. After all, Bernard Sanders is no great friend of the queer nation. Indeed, dig deep enough into Sanders’s past and it’s not hard to find traces of a traditional Marxist critique of queer sexualities and the tacit reinforcement of left-bourgeois heteronormativity, rather like that encountered in the upbringing of such monopolists as Mark Zuckerberg.
Given that Sanders has apparently come in a close second to Mayor Buttigieg in the Iowa caucuses, you would think he and his supporters might be grateful to have bamboozled so many Iowa caucus goers. Unfortunately, Sanders, like Trump, suffers from a very severe case of sore winner syndrome.
Predictably, we should have expected such ineluctably churlish behavior from Bernard Sanders. When the Nevada caucuses in 2016 devolved into violence and death threats from Sanders supporters, Sanders was slow to denounce their behavior and his belated, halfhearted denunciation, when it finally came, was so full of deflection, implementation, and Soviet-style whataboutism as to be a useless tissue of prevarications and lies.
Notwithstanding the insistence from both the Trump and Sanders campaigns on propagating disinformation and conspiracy theories, the fact remains that the Iowa Democratic Party conducted one of the most piss poor sets of caucuses since the ridiculous experiment in caucusing began in its present form after the 1972 campaign.
Of course, applying Hanlon’s Razor, we should be reluctant to ascribe to malice — or to malign conspiracies— what can be most easily, and most probably, laid at the door of stupidity on the part of the Iowa Democratic Party leadership. Indeed, the stupidity of the Democratic Party leadership in Iowa was so gross, so reckless, so over-the-top, as to be culpable.
Three steps should be taken without delay. First, the Iowa Democratic Party’s should purge its top leadership and replace them with people who have more of a sense of what the hell is going on. There simply is no excuse, particularly not in a state which prides itself on its first-in-the-nation caucuses, for conducting the caucuses so incompetently and so foolishly. If this had happened in the People’s Republic of China or the former Soviet Union, those responsible would been taken out to a stadium somewhere and pistolled publicly in the nape of the neck for their crimes.
Of course – and thankfully- we are not the Soviet Union or the PRC, Donald Trump and his efforts to destroy our democracy notwithstanding. However, what happened in Iowa last night has quite justly got a lot of people in the political class wondering if it is not time to do away with the Iowa caucuses and deprive Iowa, a small, unrepresentative, nondiverse, 90% white, farm state of its status as the “bellwether” in our national presidential campaigns. The states should give serious thought to rotating their primary contests among regions of the country, so that no single small, unrepresentative, nondiverse jurisdiction can have the kind of outsized influence on the presidential elections that Iowa and New Hampshire have managed to garner to themselves by virtue of having a first-in-the-nation presidential contest every four years.
The final step to be taken without delay is quite simply the abolition of the caucus process in every jurisdiction which selects or allocates delegates to the Democratic national convention by way of a caucus. Four years ago, I observed that caucuses are anti-democratic. Caucuses advantage the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. Caucuses require an investment of several hours of time, spent in personal attendance at an often rowdy and confrontational gathering of political activists. Because caucuses require attendance during the evening, they have the effect of excluding people who work night shifts, parents trying to take care of small children, elderly people who cannot drive at night, the poor who may lack transport to the caucus location, or the disabled who may not be able to access the caucus site. Thus, an examination of almost any caucus site, particularly in Iowa, will disclose an overwhelmingly white universe of caucus goers.
That is not what the Democratic Party is.
Moreover, caucuses do not permit secret ballots. One caucuses for one’s candidate by going physically to a particular piece of the geography of the caucus room; there is simply no provision for absentee ballots or other accommodation for those who are physically unable to attend the caucus. This facilitates intimidation tactics and belaboring by certain types of activists of a particular perfervid disposition – activists of the type who tend to gravitate toward the Sanders campaign in particular. In short, caucuses create political bedlam of the type beloved of many political activists, but not at all welcome to those who prefer to undertake their politics in a more civilized fashion.
Now contrast a typical candidate selection caucus to a closed Democratic primary election, held on election day, accessible to absentee voters as well, administered not by party apparatchiks but by public election officials, employed by their counties, and answerable to the public in the event or glitches, misfeasance, or malfeasance in the conduct of the election. In a closed Democratic primary, for example, every Democrat may vote in the primary, but only Democrats may vote, providing some degree of security from Republicans, third partisans, or no party preference voters from interfering with the Democratic Party’s own selection of its own candidates. Of course, the same observations apply pari passu to any other party, whether Republican, Green, American Independent, Peace and Freedom, or any of the other various third parties out there.
Primaries definitionally are about selecting the candidate whom the party considers should be a standardbearer. Open primaries, including California’s ridiculous “jungle primary,” should be abolished as well as candidate selection caucuses.
Moreover, in addition to getting rid of caucuses, the Democratic Party should impose requirements to put some teeth into the mandate that every state should have a closed primary. For the 2024 elections, the Democratic National Committee should mandate that every state select its Democratic standardbearers or delegates in a close primary in which, again, every Democrat may participate but only Democrats may participate.
The sanction for refusal to adopt the closed primary should be the exclusion of that state’s delegates from the Democratic national convention until the state in question unconditionally agrees to adopt a closed primary. Caucuses, that classist, racist, ableist, enterprise, ought to be relegated to the dustbin of history.
If nothing else, the egregious Mongolian cluster fuck that has been this year’s Iowa caucuses ought to provide the catalyst for dethroning Iowa and New Hampshire from their undeserved primacy, and a further catalyst for doing away with caucuses altogether.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq., is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices (after all, the more you practice, the more you might get it right) in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He spent eight years of his life as a city councilmember in Cathedral City, and 10 years of his life as a member of the Riverside County Democratic Central Committee. He leafleted and stuffed envelopes for George McGovern in 1972 at the age of eight. The views contained herein are his own.
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