Presidential candidates off and running — way too soon

Presidential candidates off and running — way too soon

This new year promises to a bizarre one for presidential politics.

2008 will be only three days old tomorrow when Iowa Republicans and Democrats will attend party caucus meetings at which they will express their presidential preferences.

Just five days later, on Tuesday, the first of the presidential primary elections will be held in New Hampshire.

There is no question that the caucuses and voting in these two hardly representative states will affect the campaign hopes and dreams of some of the candidates — and they will do so in complete disproportion to the states’ populations and their demographics compared to the nation at large.

With fewer than 3 million residents, Iowa represents less than 1 percent of the U.S. population. New Hampshire, with 1.3 million people represents less than a half-percent. Both states are far less ethnically and racially diverse than the nation at large. Ohio, by comparison, has a population about 4 times that of Iowa and 10 times that of New Hampshire — but it won’t be holding its primary election until March 4. And that’s still early in most people’s books.

In short, Iowa and New Hampshire have no business picking leaders for the rest of the nation, but in some strange way they often manage to do so. They do so by virtue of positioning themselves at the front end of the process, which is no great feat. And they do so by collectively taking their politics much more seriously than the rest of the country. So, in at least one way, they come by their disproportionate role in national politics the old-fashioned way: they work for it.

By 6:30 p.m. Thursday, if turnout is as expected, 150,000 Iowa Democrats and 80,000 Republicans will gather in public libraries and church basements in 1,784 precincts, possibly to propel one or more of a dozen potential candidates to their party’s nomination.

Inside a caucus

Straw polls are taken with candidates required to get at least 15 percent of the vote to be considered “viable.” Failing that, supporters of nonviable candidates have the option to join a viable candidate group, join another nonviable candidate group to become viable, join other groups to form an uncommitted group or chose to go nowhere and not be counted. And all that has to be done within 30 minutes.

The caucus chair then multiplies the number of members in each preference group times the number of delegates allotted that precinct and divides by the number of eligible attendees at the caucus. The candidate with the most delegates wins — sort of.

The caucus is actually electing delegates to a later county convention, which in turn chooses delegates for a district convention, then the state convention and finally the national presidential nominating convention, by which time Iowa has been all but forgotten.

What Iowa does manage to do is focus the attention of candidates, make them answer questions from ordinary men and women in forums that are less likely to be seen in New York or Los Angeles and test the ability of candidates to think on their feet.

In that way Iowa and New Hampshire perform a service to the rest of us. But that service shouldn’t be exaggerated.

Both parties are going to have to take a strong look at what they can do to compress the nominating process into a time frame that doesn’t have candidates running Christmas campaign ads and that doesn’t run the risk of having the candidates all but selected six months before the political conventions and 10 months before election day.