The Thing About My Back Is It's Located On My Caucus

Mack Burgess
Pi Kappa Alpha

One day every four years, Iowa matters.  At least, that’s what we’re led to believe.  

It’s in the great face-shaped state that the actual Presidential nomination process begins.  On January 4, 2012 Republican loyalists gathered in town halls, hotel conference rooms, and elementary school gymnasiums to decide who would challenge the President in November.  Though all the states will host their own caucus or primary (the main difference between these being “caucus” tends to generate muddled laughter among the young, mostly Ron-Pauly people), Iowa does it first, meaning the Iowa caucus is the first true litmus test for candidates.

A win, or even a second place finish there does wonders for endorsements and  campaign donations.  The reason here being that most people wait to make high-dollar contributions until a front-runner emerges; or at least until a myriad of middle-class would-be soccer moms come forward with sexual harassment allegations.  In other words, people don’t want to waste their money donating to a candidate who doesn’t have a shot.  The winner in Iowa, after receiving a verifiable head-nod from the people, tends to surge forward in both the opinion polls and in fundraising.  It’s something of a “snowball” effect, they say.

Oh, yes. The results. Mitt Romney edged Rick Santorum by eight votes, evidently making it the closest caucus or primary for either party since the nail-biter of ’36... Your guess here is as good as mine.  Ron Paul came in third, drawing on a bizarre but oddly comprehensible synergy between the zero-government right and the anti-war left.  Newt Gingrich placed fourth, keeping him in the hunt and allowing him to sets his sights on South Carolina, the first major test in the South and a state that may play in his favor.  And that’s the last thing I’ll say about the numbers.  By the time this article appears in print, Republicans in New Hampshire will have also made their selection, and the statistical minutia here won’t matter much.  In 2008, Mike Huckabee won, and that’s pretty much all anyone tends or needs to remember.

The most amusing moment of the night came when Michelle Bachmann, in another wildly detached and wide-eyed speech to supporters, asserted, no, admitted, that her husband Marcus had, in fact, been out shopping for “doggy sunglasses” that afternoon; and, in my humble opinion, confirmed what appears to be a homosexual tendency so repressed it sort of makes me want to bake and eat my own cupcake. 

I don’t mean to be crude or malicious here, really, but if the purpose of these caucus/primary fiascos is to sift through the endless buffet line of political balderdash and identify these would-be world leaders really are as human beings, it seems kind of kosher to go ahead and call a spade a spade or a cigar a cigar or whatever.

All in all, the night was pretty boring.  And that’s from someone who sort of cares.  I mean, I watch this stuff some.  The Iowa Caucus and its related coverage and analysis was a certified snooze-fest. Some of why is because both caucus results, and whatever considerations might follow, are inconsistently reliable and reliably inconsistent.  In other words, sometimes the numbers are an accurate indication of where the country is leaning, but almost never do they follow one another in any kind of meaningful and interpretive way.  It’s hard to say what this means really, but the holidays are pretty much over, the egg nog is gone, and I’m back school without the free-flow of parental funds to support whatever habits allow me to lay around and pay attention to all this stuff.  Plus it’s getting colder.

Mack is a senior studying political science and English. You may contact him at mburges3@utk.edu.