“It’s nasty out there,” Trump said as he arrived in Iowa. It’s -10 degrees here pic.twitter.com/FvhwEB8mzf
— Tyler Pager (@tylerpager) January 14, 2024
Yes, yes, you’re sick of it already… but if ‘we’ don’t cover the early probably-meaningless scrums, we might miss some once-in-a-career upset…
Blowing snow at Des Moines airport and long delays on the DSM tarmac to get to the gate — few ground crew could make it in to work, our pilot said — but flights are landing in central Iowa. https://t.co/fcLq6SpAYn pic.twitter.com/kOns9zqooa
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) January 13, 2024
Mr. Charles P. Pierce, one of the writers I’m counting on to get me through the next eight months, with an extract from his Saturday subscriber blog — “A Bleak Forecast In Iowa And the Weather’s Bad, Too”:
… The last Iowa caucus I attended took place in a gun store way out in the boonies south of Des Moines. It was a Republican caucus and fifteen people attended. Ted Cruz won the balloting, I think. I lost track of the results as I lost track of the route back to Des Moines, which gave me a lot of time to dwell on the fundamental absurdity of granting this archaic, jerry-rigged process pride of place in our selection of the next president of the United States. Somewhere around Indianola, I determined that the Iowa caucuses had seen the last of me.
The last time around, the caucuses descended into farce. Plagued by a bug-ridden mobile app, incompetence at the highest level, and campaigns determined to take advantage of both of these things, it took sixteen days for the Iowa Democrats to determine finally that Pete Buttigieg had won more delegates than Bernie Sanders had. By then, of course, the country had returned to not giving a damn what happens in Iowa, which is the sensible thing to do.
The Democratic Party gave up its participation in this goat-roping. There was much weeping and rending of garments over this, mostly from people who believe that a quadrennial trip to the cornfields is just too fcking adorable. But a barely organized gathering of god-bothering white hayshakers has as much to do with the modern Democratic Party as it does with Luxembourg’s Chamber of Deputies…
Sunday Morning Open Thread: Political Playoffs Coverage, Iowa EditionPost + Comments (217)