So in an
admittedly underwhelming bit of news,
Michele Bachmann won the first of
many symbolic rites of passage for Republican presidential hopefuls, an ever-expanding array of candidates including Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich, libertarian pillar Ron Paul, gourmand and restaurateur
Herman Cain, and the recently-added Texas governor and Bush sound-alike, Rick Perry.
At the risk of chiming in with the rest of the online world, I wonder aloud what's so damned fascinating about today's Iowa straw poll. Boiling it down, it's essentially been a glad-handing affair involving a dozen thousand of the GOP's staunchest fans, more than half of whom singled out Tea Party frontispiece Bachmann and fringe-politician Ron Paul as their top choice. Comparing this to
national poll ratings, it places this majority of straw poll voters proportionally into a much narrower subgroup of actual,
national voters. Also taking into consideration Bachmann calls Iowa home, it's little wonder she took the victory ('narrowly' at that, says CNN).
Anyway, all I'm saying is that the media romance with Iowa (and yes, New Hampshire) should come to an end. Not only are the states woefully unreflective of the nation as a voting whole (and relatively unimportant electorally), but using this flawed mechanism to weed out the candidates (adieu, Tim Pawlenty) in this day and age of instant telecommunication is our Old Sarum of the American political edifice. It's a goddamn bit of misinformation and a colorful one at that, and like all
misleading flashes of color it's the thing latently interested people look to first.
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