With Iowa out of the way, it’s time for GOP to get serious

Iowa has every right to try to be first out of the box in expressing its choice for a presidential nominee evey four years. It shouldn’t have any expectation that the rest of the nation cares very much.

Of course the press must share some of the responsibility for over hyping Iowa. And, sure enough, we’re talking about it too.

But if anything, Iowa’s role in the primary election process should be nothing more than a quaint tradition. To the extent that it takes on a larger importance, the parties, the press, the public and the candidates themselves do a disservice to the nation.

Iowa is a state of about 3 million people, which simplifies the math in a nation of 300 million people. One in 100 Americans is an Iowan. That might be a significant percentage if Iowa as a state were demographically representative of the nation. Or if were historically a bellwether state. But it isn’t.

And even if the state’s 3 million residents were a reflection of the nation, the 122,000 people who came out for Tuesday night’s caucuses don’t even amount to a statistical blip. There were nearly that many people in the Rose Bowl on Jan. 20, 1980, to see the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl XIV. And it would be a safe bet that those 103,985 fans came closer to mirroring the rest of the nation, except that an inordinate percentage were wearing gold.

The results out of Iowa were these:

Mitt Romney, 30,015, 24.6%

Rick Santorum, 30,007,24.5%

Ron Paul, 26,219, 21.4%

Newt Gingrich, 16,251,13.3%

Rick Perry, 12,604, 10.3%

Michele Bachmann, 6,073, 5%

Jon Huntsman, 745, 0.6%

And on the basis of those numbers, Bachmann dropped out of the race, and it appeared for a while that Perry would follow her.

Why?

This is January. The Republican National Convention opens in Tampa Aug. 27. The election is in November. Fewer than one in 2,500 Americans was heard from in Iowa Tuesday.

A long way to go

There should be an awful lot of campaigning left in the GOP field at this point

There are 10 debates scheduled for the Republican candidates, stretching from tomorrow at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., to March 19 in Portland, Ore.

The penultimate one will be March 5, at the Reagan Library in California, a day before Super Tuesday, when 10 states, including Ohio, will hold their primaries.

And even after Super Tuesday, primaries will be held in 31 states and territories, stretching into early June.

It’s now time for all of the candidates to do less generic attacking of one another and President Barack Obama and more presentation of concrete information on what they would do about the economy, unemployment, taxes and deficits, defense, infrastructure investment and foreign affairs.

Some of the histrionics and personal attacks have provided an entertaining diversion. But this is supposed to be a process that gives the American people some assurance that the party’s nominee has been thinking beyond the next primary and toward the nation’s future.