William Saletan invokes the spectre of Election 2000 as he glibly equates the Iowa caucus counting process with the deeply flawed recount in Florida:
Bush's edge in the [Electoral College] delegate tally was in doubt, since a photo finish in the pivotal jurisdiction, Florida, required an official recount that was never systematically conducted or completed.There's a very good chance it's about to happen all over again.
He goes on to moan that the "raw vote" in Iowa is never released, and is not determinative -- that only the counts of delegates are released to the press. The "raw vote" is just the first step in the caucuses. Saletan wants us to believe that someone might manipulate those first numbers in the case of a closely-drawn contest. But the raw vote consists of people standing in their candidate's corner, quite literally, while everybody counts the heads. There's a winnowing-out procedure, and then a final vote-proportional assignment of delegates among several of the top-finishing candidates. What is so sinister about that?
Saletan sums up the Florida debacle by declaring "Everyone could argue about which ballots should count. But at least there were ballots to look at. In Iowa, there will be no ballots." Got that? He seems to think the result must be like a vote, where everyone gets counted individually. He adds some manufactured hand-wringing about the trailing candidates not getting their due. "If you want to know how many voters stood up for John Edwards, you're out of luck." But Iowa "isn't national or final," to quote Saletan himself, so why does it matter?
Saletan wants you to believe that the caucus is so complicated that it's not fair. He wants you to believe, subliminally, that a disputed electoral process is the same whether it's national and final, or state party-based and preliminary. He even admits it! "This time, the vote isn't national or final," Saletan confesses.
The hack's real worry is that the media won't have firm vote-percentage charts of each candidate, and won't be able to make its accustomed sage pronouncements about "viability" and "electability" and "excitement of the base". In short, that the race for the Democratic nomination will continue to be a race, and the media will have to sit on their hands like everyone else, unsure of who the winner will be. Iowa isn't national, and it isn't final. There are 49 other states that throw their delegates into the ring for the Democratic convention. Then we have a vote in November, where everyone really is counted, or so we hope. And that's a national vote. Has Saletan forgotten that?
He doesn't want to remember. And he wants you to forget the doubts about Diebold election machines and what they might do to the actual final, national result this November. He wants the media to have a quick resolution to its narrative, not a complicated, technical, important story. "If you liked the Florida recount, you'll love the Iowa caucuses," goes the teaser caption on Saletan's article. The writer must have loved the Florida recount enough to recycle the story for Iowa, even though the dissimilarities between the two are enough to make the comparison laughable.
Posted by Chris at January 19, 2004 07:12 AM