Politico's Roger Simon has a piece up about how irredeemably screwed up the Iowa caucusing process really is--so screwed up, in fact, that fewer than 10 percent of voting-age Iowans even bother to participate.
I suppose you could argue that anyone who can't be bothered to put in the time necessary to participate in this grand and glorious display of democracy in action doesn't deserve to have their vote count. But that seems a little harsh, considering that the deck is heavily stacked in favor of certain groups who simply have more free time to spend two hours twisting their neighbors arm at these bizarre gatherings--say, old folks without small kids at home or who don't have to get up for work the next day or who don't have piles of schoolwork to be done.
Iowa's caucus system, as Simon explains, was originally set up to favor party insiders who devoted large amounts of time and money to the cause. Today, it continues to give an unhealthy amount of clout to a vanishingly small fraction of folks in an already wildly unrepresentative state.
I say kill it before we reach the point where a dozen or so septugenarian farmers wind up all-but-deciding who the Democratic nominee will be.
--Michelle Cottle