The Washington Post Gets It at Least Half Wrong Once Again

This week, in an opinion piece penned by that great arbiter of political fairness and objectivity, liberal toady and left wing Washington Post scribbler, Richard Cohen, suggests that one of the GOP’s biggest challenges is the caucus and primary contests which traditionally start in Iowa and New Hampshire. Cohen lecturing the GOP on its challenges is a little like Barack Obama lecturing Cyprus on austerity.

In fairness, Cohen gets it at least partly correct.

Iowa is NOT representative of the rest of America, but more importantly Iowa doesn’t even closely resemble the minority of general election voters who checked Mitt Romney over Barack Obama in 2012. This is something we from New Hampshire are never supposed to do: challenge the sacred bond of Iowa first, New Hampshire second. We have a holy alliance to keep those other pesky would-be interloper states from grabbing the first contests. It’s “omerta,” the Sicilian word used by the mob to describe their code of silence. It’s Skull and Bones, a secret society of coercion dedicated to keeping Iowa and New Hampshire forever first and the rest of you…well, pissed off. Our two states have carefully guarded their long and rich traditions of being “First in the Nation.” And let’s be honest, it’s pretty good for business and the notoriety for both states.

But New Hampshire has a few other things going for it besides First in the Nation status: mountains, a beautiful seacoast, and a real primary election held by real voters who vote secretly in a voting booth as opposed to arguing late into the night in some church basement. There are big differences between Iowa and New Hampshire. Someone needs to inform Mr. Cohen of this fact as his column weakly attempts to suggest that they are one and the same.

Iowa’s raucus caucus brings actual people to Iowa and they stay…at least as long as they have to in order to cover the campaigns. For the Hawkeye State, having journalists from across the globe come to your little hamlet of a state to stay in overpriced hotel rooms in the middle of winter and report live from some hayseed’s farm or a snow bank in Gillett Grove, are good for rooms and meals tax revenue. But anyone who knows anything about both states, knows that it is simply ignorant to lump the two together suggesting that they are both equal right of center bastions for Christian conservatives whose main concerns are tent revivals, abortion and speaking in tongues. Ideologically speaking, Iowa and New Hampshire are like two separate countries. Maybe Mr. Cohen might be able to get one of his editors to approve a trip to both states, so he could see that for himself. I know it’s tough for a reporter to get travel expenses approved from a newspaper that’s bleeding $50 mil a year, but maybe it would make Mr. Cohen’s “observations” a bit more precise, better yet, accurate.

According to 2012 Iowa exit polling, here is the ideological profile of Iowa Republicans. They are overwhelmingly (99%) white. Those claiming to be born-again or self “evangelical” weighed in at 57%. 47% of Iowans identified as very conservative, and over 64% identified as “strong” Tea Party supporters. On the issues Iowa GOP voters thought matter the most, 13% said abortion and 4% said healthcare. Another 34% said the federal budget deficit, and more than 42% said the economy. About 80% of Republican voters said abortion should always be illegal.

It’s safe to say that Mr. Cohen gets it half right. Iowa is a pretty conservative place! It’s also a place where they hold the big Iowa State Fair in Ames every summer, a perennial stop for candidates who wish to become president and the very same place the Iowa GOP holds its quadrennial Ames Presidential Straw Poll. This silly sideshow costs a fortune for campaigns to play in and rarely results in even coming close to choosing the eventual party nominee. That likely explains why Michele Bachmann won in 2011.

The fair itself is certainly an odd event. I’m not certain Mr. Cohen has been, and no doubt if he has, his beltway liberal sensibilities were not impressed with the deep fried Twinkies and the Speaker’s Corner, a place where candidates are expected to hop up on a hay bale and let it rip. Had he been there, he also would have certainly not been impressed with the life-size sculpture of The Last Supper done in….. pure butter. And of course, the crusading demonstrations by the candidates’ supporters, and the spontaneous outbursts of near histrionic support for guys like Rick Santorum and Ron Paul are pure Iowa. Iowa is different, Iowa is conservative and Iowa does in fact set the wrong tone for the GOP. That’s about where Mr. Cohen’s hypothesis ends any semblance of reality.

Compare Iowa to New Hampshire. New Hampshire is also a largely white state, almost 95% of GOP voters claiming not to be persons of color. Compared to Iowa, New Hampshire has far fewer primary participants registered as members of the GOP with about 49% compared to 75% in Iowa. Unlike Iowa, Independent voters play a huge role in New Hampshire and account for about 47% of voters in 2012 compared to 23% in Iowa. In New Hampshire, about 21% identify themselves as “very conservative” and only 22% claimed “strong” Tea Party support. Furthermore, the number of primary participants claiming to be born-again or “evangelical” was only about 22%. The issues that mattered most to New Hampshire voters were the economy with 61% of the vote, followed by the federal budget deficit at 24%. Abortion came in at 6%. The New Hampshire electorate overall supports abortion rights, all or most of the time, with about 71% in support, and only 27% of those surveyed indicate they would support overturning Roe vs. Wade.

It’s one thing for the out of touch Obama squad at the Washington Post to take a whack at the GOP, it’s another to simply misreport the facts. New Hampshire’s demographic and ideological voter profile looks far more like the rest of America than does Iowa’s. I’ll likely never be able to get off a plane again in Des Moines after this piece, but Iowa looked for a short time in 2012 as though it at least would have the good sense to get behind the eventual GOP nominee by giving Mitt Romney a slight edge over Rick Santorum (who has about as much chance of becoming president of the United States as I do). But Iowa once again relegated itself to near irrelevance a couple of days later when after Romney was announced the narrow winner, they then announced that once they actually certified the vote Santorum had won by 34 votes. Hence the saying “As Iowa goes, nobody cares!”

So Mr.Cohen, in some of the most misguided and uninformed opining to come out of the WaPo fish wrapper in a long time, believes Iowa and New Hampshire are equally trivial, and ideologically problematic for the GOP? Interesting. Maybe data and fact are simply not important. There is a clear and distinct difference between Iowa and New Hampshire and the numbers prove it.

It seems to me that last person to come out of Iowa on Wounded Knee was a Democrat. Hillary Clinton was nearly embarrassed out of the race for the nomination by the way she was treated by Dems in Iowa. Surely they too must be as misguided as the Republicans. Yet Hillary came to New Hampshire and upset Obama by nearly 3.5%.

There are probably a lot of things that are problematic with the Iowa caucuses. That’s one good reason for that old saying “Iowa picks corn, New Hampshire picks Presidents.” I look forward to seeing Mr. Cohen in the Granite State sometime soon. In fact, if the Post won’t pay for his plane ticket here, I will. Then maybe he’ll get to see the difference between Iowa and New Hampshire for himself. The other option? I could buy him a plane ticket to Gillett Grove. I hear mud season is a real big deal there.