What He Said
By In response to this excellent Paul Waldman article, Yglesias cuts to the heart of the matter:
I’ll beat that. What’s really, really remarkable is the source of Iowa’s growing significance — arbitrary diktat from the media. If campaign reporters covered Iowa in a manner proportionate to its objective significance — the assignment of a tiny number of delegates by an unrepresentative electorate through an arbitrary and anti-democratic procedure — then Iowa would barely matter at all. But the press, instead of doing that, treats us to this endless valorization of the alleged “authenticity” of Iowa as if the vast majority of Americans who don’t live in all-white rural states are somehow fake.
These narratives of “authenticity” are indeed crucial, because the idea of having the two major candidates for President be effectively selected by a handful of small and unrepresentative rural states, one with a voting system badly designed even by American standards, rather than by the party membership as a whole or at least the party’s elected representatives is transparently indefensible. It’s not as if there aren’t plenty of examples of rational and democratic ways of selecting party leaders to choose from; we’ve just chosen to not to adopt them, and the silly veneration of anachronistic retail politics in Iowa and New Hampshire is a way of ignoring that it’s an incredibly bad way of choosing a President.