File under: How Can You Be This Stupid?

Last night on national television, the Iowa Democratic Party shot itself in foot, and this morning it’s holding the same gun to its own head.  At this writing at 6:00 am, results of the caucus last night are still not in, and no one can say when they will be.  Holy Jesus.  With the 2020 election being probably the most significant presidential election in US history, some genius in Iowa decided it was a REALLY GOOD IDEA to roll out a new app to report caucus results.  AND, employing typical state party incompetence, training on said new app was between lame and non-existent.  Chaos ensued during the evening caucuses and the app, as apps are wont to do, locked up.  The state party then told precinct chairs to phone it in, jamming phone lines.  Some precincts actually had to take a photo of the app screen and drive the results in.  Stupid.  Incredibly stupid.

I’ve never really understood why Iowa has been so important for the last 40 years since Jimmy Carter put it on the map.  Or why it goes first.  Or why it still uses the caucus system which has never been all that reliable. Along with New Hampshire and Vermont, Iowa is probably the least representative of national diversity.  It’s sparsely populated and overwhelmingly white. I do know one thing – the Democratic Party didn’t need this, and is a terrible start to the 2020 election cycle.  Also, I predict that this is Iowa’s last time to be first and last caucus.

I have a suggestion for reforming Iowa’s caucus system and it goes like this:

1. Print up a whole bunch of sheets of paper with the candidate’s names on them.
2. Find a whole bunch of buildings around the state (churches, schools) that people can easily find.
3. Provide some little tables that have some privacy (We can even call them voting booths).
4. Have people come to this place, take a form, and put a mark next to the name of the candidate they want.
5. Count the marks for each candidate.
6. Send the totals in.
7. Go home and drink a beer.

I know this is a really unique approach to picking a presidential nominee, but it might just work, especially if the precinct chairs could read and count.  And, it would eliminate the idiocy of hopeful candidates spending years and millions of dollars drumming up support among the three dozen or so people living in the goddam state.  Iowa never deserved to go first with it’s stupid caucus system, and richly deserves to be moved to like the last on the list of Super Tuesday (or later).

Sheesh

Our readers who are Hillary loyalists don’t like when I write about the disaster of her campaign last year and the mess that is the Democratic Party.  Like it or not, though, the criticism is true, and I’m not the only one.  Tim Dickinson wrote a lengthy piece in Rolling Stone this last week that talks about how the party got hollowed out during the Obama years especially during Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s term which set a low watermark for corruption and plain ol’ incompetence.  Even Tim Kaine, Hillary’s running mate and former DNC chair, got into the act and was quoted in the piece saying, “That congresswoman had no idea what she was doing.”  And that was the polite criticism.  Rather than grow the party, she actually used her position for self promotion to launch a campaign to land her in House leadership.  That blew up and she dug in when even Obama tried to oust her from the job.  We all know how that story ended.

It gets worse, especially for Hillary’s campaign.  An unnamed Democratic strategist described her candidacy in blunt terms:

“And she was really surprised by how strong Trump was – and part of it was she just sucked. At a really fundamental level we gotta get people to acknowledge what a f*****g piece of sh*t her campaign was, because Donald Trump should not have won this election.”

Well, OK, then.  That’s about as blunt as it gets (even more blunt than me).  The rest of the article speaks of how Tom Perez is trying to un-fossilize the party, recruit new candidates, and resurrect the money machine that it became under Howard Dean and Barack Obama during the very successful 50 state strategy in 2006 and 2008.

However, the job is not a simple one.  During the Obama administration, Democrats lost all over the country in state and federal elections due to simple neglect (and DWS’s incompetence).  No one, including Obama, was in charge during that time, and his staff had no national plan except to get him re-elected in 2012.  There’s now a huge deficit to make up for all that neglect, and Trump is certainly leaving a huge opportunity for the Dems to hoover up if only they don’t blow it…again.

This Rolling Stone article is a sobering read, and will certainly piss off loyalists.  But truth is truth, and facts is facts. This chapter is long from over, and the sooner progressives recognize what a complete disaster 2008 to 2016 actually was, the sooner they can fix it.