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Below are a couple of quotes from articles at HuffingtonPost about Iowa voters:
Example 1:
“On New Year's Day Anya Robinson was still on the fence. "I still am undecided on who I want to caucus for. I feel like I haven't gotten enough information about each of the candidates to decide yet, so I'm just kind of trying to figure out in the last couple of days to figure out who I'm going to be caucusing for, but I know I will be caucusing," she said.”
Example 2:
“At the center of the hunt were undecided voters like Jill Eddy, a retired school teacher who showed up at a Hillary event Wednesday morning in Indianola.”I thought she was wonderful," Eddy said of Clinton's presentation. "She addresses real problems and has real plans; she's down-to-earth, not just speaking about ideals." On the other hand, Eddy said, she saw Obama last Sunday and really liked him, too. "I don't know, I could also go with him," she said. "But I might vote for Romney because I'm still a registered Republican. I haven't decided yet whether to cross over and go Democratic."
I could paste in many more similar interviews with Iowans, but these will suffice as a sampling. After months if not a year or more of candidates crossing their state, meeting and talking everywhere, in addition to the news, interviews, online discussions, these people still don’t know who they are going to “vote” for tonight?
The retired schoolteacher bothers me most. Hell, if you’re retired in Iowa you could meet all the candidates in person if you wanted to. Aren’t teachers educated? Don’t they help students to engage in fact-gathering and critical thinking to come to logical conclusions? Maybe not in Iowa. Maybe they took that out of the curriculum to make room for Creationism.
I find this appalling but not shocking; I read What’s the Matter With Kansas long ago. And Iowa is not far from Kansas. Another place full of ten-dollar an hour Republicans, working people voting against their own best interests. The other indicator is the rapid rise of Mike Huckabee. Show them a cross, a fish symbol and use words like "Christ" or "church" in every speech and watch the lemmings line up. Elmer Gantry as the new Karl Rove.
The worst part of this is the disproportional influence these voters have over the rest of us. Iowa will weed out candidates you might like; pundits say that there are three tickets out. The media will ignore the rest. Financial backers will close their wallets to candidates who might still have a chance in other states. Couple this with the knowledge that the Iowa caucus has a traditional low voter turnout, maybe 20% of those eligible, and you might conclude that Iowans don’t’ pay much attention to politics, and many don’t give a damn. Tonight there is a college bowl game on TV, so there’s another “turnout” problem.
The only things I could say in their defense are that they have a right to be like this, and, they are not alone. What makes them special is that they are first in the nation to influence the outcome of a Presidential race. It would be better if they just admitted their cavalier attitudes to this and changed their caucus date to later in the year. That way, they wouldn’t have to pretend to care. They could sit around their coffee shops talking about crop rotation and leave the political decisions up to the rest of us.
Write on.
--KZ
But there are positives to take out of the Iowa media show. One hopeful sign is that the youth are finally starting to mobilize and get engaged in politics. Why not? They stand the most to lose from the decisions we are making today. Another hopeful sign are the sheer numbers of people fed up with the status quo (i.e. Bush), that record numbers of Dems showed up, and record numbers of independents swung to the left for this caucus. If that can happen in 97% white, conservative Iowa -- for a black liberal no less, then the times they are a changin'. And finally, as much as I lament the stupidity of the comments above, I get the feeling that despite the failure of our media and the decline of our education, there are still many Americans who are firing on all six cylinders (or is that four?), at least for now. I hope these comments from the trenches in Iowa are the exception, and not the rule.
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