The Folly of Iowa

Much of my anger at the caucus system is elegantly explained in this great article from Christopher Hitchens. The caucus system, where voters' decisions are influenced by other people due to the lack of a secret ballot, is anything but democratic, with the winner of the Iowa Caucus declared the front-runner for a party's candidacy. As Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post put it, an Iowa victory, without massive media inflation of the event, "amounts to scoring a run in the top of the first inning." It's too bad that the media, a direct beneficiary of the sizable outlays the candidates make, can allow less than 300,000 voters (the expected number of participants in the Iowa and New Hampshire events) to, in essence, choose a party's Presidential candidate.