The Iowa Caucus: Watch Them Run

Tomorrow the US election season kicks off with the Iowa Presidential preference caucuses. The plural of the term caucus (namely, a meeting or gathering of members) is being used here because in Iowa this event is held locally in various public buildings in each of its nearly 1,800 precincts. What happens here in Iowa is that these caucuses elect local delegates, who elect state delegates, who select the national convention delegates (Presidential Electors) who in turn cast their state's votes (7 electoral votes for Iowa: it takes 270 electoral votes to win the Presidential election) for the President and Vice-President of the US. Not unlike the rest of the US Presidential electoral process, the very first step toward electing a President is exceedingly convoluted and vastly indirect. But, hey, folks are and have been content with this process of electing their big wigs so it must be working, right?

What is important to note here is that for the past thirty-five years the Iowa caucus has been the first step into the process for nominating a US President. Accordingly, this event is closely watched and reported on by all media, major and independent, and it is widely believed to bear exceptional effect on the success and perseverance of who remains in the race to the Presidency and who drops out.

The mainstream media will deluge us with stories that essentially treat the election as a paint-by-numbers exercise: with nothing more than red and blue on the palette. For the bulk of news readers, I suppose that's fine; it is a two-party system, after all. We should, however, have higher expectations from the censors; for it is they, in the final analysis, who supervise public morals especially to those with the appetite to see through a seemingly interminable presidential electoral process.

I have long been tired of the facile and jejune analysis and partisanship in traditional media. I gave up on TV first and newspapers not long thereafter. I don't know, perhaps the advent of the internet has had much to do with ditching these dinosaurs. I needed objective and disinterested assessment of current affairs and could not find it on Channel 7; I needed snapshots of where our country fits into the international system and could not find anything to read on it in The New York Times; I needed to know about my politician's true capabilities and capacities but alas could not bring to light this info from any orthodox news source; I wanted to know about the threats and opportunities this country of ours faces and found myself just shutting everything off, for there was nothing on, nothing meaningful printed in any consequential way.

We ought to be more interested and attentive in what the United States can do than in what some politician is promising to do. Mainstream media package candidates the same way advertising firms sell cereal: sound-bytes and photo-ops. Who needs slogans and logos, we're drowning in all this as it is. There ought to be a difference between "news" and "intelligence." But where is it? In Iowa, perhaps?