The Chris Moeller Archives

Caucus yourself

I will not be participating in the Iowa Caucuses. There are two principle reasons-- #1, I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and #2, participation only lends the event a legitimacy it does not deserve.

To participate in a Democratic Party Caucus in Iowa, one has to be a registered Democrat or change their party affiliation in advance or at the scene. I did this upon entering my neighborhood caucus gathering in January 2008. My mission that night was to support the presidential candidacy of Dennis Kucinich, but the six or seven of us gathered at that location were not enough for the Congressman to even be considered “viable.” I spent the better part of three hours at the caucus, spending most of the time listening to party platform proposals, and then my vote for chief executive didn’t even get counted, or even footnoted, because our members were so few. I was given only the opportunity to switch to one of the “viable” candidates-- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John Edwards. (It’s under this unholy format that Martin O’Malley will likely earn zero delegates this year in Iowa despite recent polling support upwards of 5%.) Such are the mechanisms of America’s self-described “Democratic” party.

That was the last formal function of that party in which I participated. I walked out into the cold that night carrying my second fresh voter registration card of the evening, this one to switch my registration back to Independent through the mail the following morning. By the time the next presidential cycle rolled through the Hawkeye State, I had run, myself, as a candidate for state representative as a member of the Green Party, and the state passed a law that allowed me, and anyone else, to formally register as a member of the Greens-- or with the Libertarians, because those two additional political parties had met established electoral standards that include having to run a certain number of candidates in state races each decade. Many righteous persons worked long and aggressively through the courts to get the Green Party option added to the registration forms in Iowa, and switching affiliation, even for a night, to participate in the activities of one of the heads of the duopoly is not something I’m comfortable doing.

What’s good for Iowa is often not good for the rest of the United States. With this statement, we could be referring to several things-- ethanol subsidies, or federal mandates to buy crappy health insurance products (Des Moines is U.S. insurance capital #2, behind Hartford, Connecticut), but in this instance, I’m talking about our first-in-the-nation caucuses. The presidential candidates log thousands of miles in Iowa every four years reaching out to only the political die-hards. Some perennial candidates never seem to leave us. (This political system doubles as our punishment.) Iowans like to believe that the ancient voting structure of the caucus, which is very different than that of a primary, is most democratic-- neighbors gathering with neighbors to sip coffee, discuss issues, and cast their votes. It sounds terrific, but it’s pig shit.

The one-night-only caucuses are held on a Monday during the middle of winter, possibly during a snow storm. Unlike a primary, in which each voter can cast their ballot with a brief stop at the polling station before or after work, or during their lunch, caucus participation requires evening attendance, and not a brief attendance either. In most locations, voters are committing to at least a two hour endeavor, and there is obviously no such concept in play as an absentee ballot. (Also, FYI, in case you're new to it, they're going to pass the hat.) It’s also not a secret vote. Any of your neighbors might be there to inflict pressure or shame-- your friends, your family, your banker, your clergy, a person to whom you owe money, your hair stylist, your teacher, your union leader, your boss. That's kind of a big one.

Should employers in the state be required to give their employees time off to participate in the process? Absolutely not. The general election should be on a Saturday, or made a holiday, but the caucuses and primaries are the apparatus of the two major parties-- the Democrats and the Republicans. It should be up to their organizers to make the voting process accessible to the people if they, in fact, value a high level of participation, and clearly they don’t. Neither the state of Iowa nor its individual municipalities should be offering anything other than free public space to the parties for these self-governing functions. Iowa’s current economic support of the caucuses is, itself, an endorsement of the two-party system.

Would I like the opportunity to vote for Bernie Sanders? Yes I would. He’s the best presidential candidate the Democratic Party has put up... well, ever. (Maybe McGovern.) It’s probably just a coincidence that Sanders is not actually a Democrat. He’s a self-described Democratic Socialist who represents Vermont in the United States Senate as an Independent, one of only two Indies serving in that chamber. He made a decision this year to seek the presidential nomination of a party to which he does not formally belong, which is fine, until he loses because most members of his party don’t share his progressive vision. Then the man has a moral obligation, I believe, to get himself on the general election ballot in November in some other form, which unfortunately in this case, he will not choose to do, and that the two war parties have made virtually impossible at a state-to-state level even if the candidate is a completely self-financed individual, and Sanders is not one of those.

After Super Tuesday on March 1st, “the Bern” will only be felt in the Democratic Party graveyard, along with other progressive causes the party has co-opted with the intent of burying-- the anti-war movement, single-payer health insurance, Wall Street accountability. The list is long. Sanders’ ball will hopefully be picked up and carried by others, but for 2016, the only impact his candidacy will have had will be on Clinton, and not even on her policies and plans for governance, only her rhetoric towards the same.

The Democratic National Committee’s distaste for Sanders and his army of mostly-young, untriangulated voters is best represented by the actions last week of Committee chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz-Clinton. She ordered the suspension of the Sanders campaign’s access to its own electronic voter identification information after two Sanders staffers accessed Clinton campaign information from a server left unprotected. (The staffers’ mistake, I guess, was not steering the information discreetly to a private server, as Hillary prefers to do.) The punishment handed down to the Sanders campaign by Clinton’s BFF, based on the actions of staffers that were immediately fired by Sanders, was so punitive that even the traditional media was forced to weigh in on the matter. Remember when Bernie came to Hillary’s rescue during a televised debate in Des Moines over the issue of Clinton’s private email server? I guess Democratic operatives don’t.If you thought Clinton wouldn't get dirty, you missed the part of 2008 when her operatives contacted Matt Drudge with the first Obama is a Muslim Marxist story line. 

Sanders has been playing too nice. I'm still waiting for him to begin issuing forceful attacks upon Clinton’s political record, which has really been that of a mainstream Republican for a half-century-- from her student days as a Goldwater girl, through her support of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the Defense of Marriage Act, NAFTA, mandatory sentencing guidelines, the war on Iraq, and Wall Street self-policing. The disadvantage of being an independent politician like Sanders, I guess, is that you don’t have party hacks to do your slashing for you.

This nomination has been written out for Clinton by the party machine. It's been in her hands since the ’08 electoral pasting she took at the hands of Obama. It’s a make-good from the Wall Street titans whose bag she so gleefully carries. Nobody else dared oppose her this year except for the white-haired Socialist from the crunchy Green Mountain State. Progressives will pull their hair out worrying that Sanders' defeat means that the country is too right wing for such a visionary, but they can actually rest assured that it’s really just the Democrats that are too right-wing. Polls show Sanders would fare better than Clinton against any theoretical Republican challenger in state after state, even throughout much of the “right wing” South. Sanders is generally perceived as a fundamentally honest man that puts the needs of the country above his own career and his own pocketbook. Hillary is perceived as a Clinton.

When D.C.'s creaky press corps lands in Iowa on February 1st and attempts to tell the story of Clinton’s caucus triumph, they’ll leave out several important points. They’ll proclaim Clinton the winner going away, and they’ll explain that she has her finger on what the voters of America are feeling, even though it was just dedicated party activists that came out to support her. Sanders will fare better a few days later in New Hampshire, and not just because it’s a state that borders Vermont-- after all, it borders Clinton's home state of New York as well, but because voters there pull a lever in secret, they have a more independent streak collectively, and they’re allowed to vote for any candidate for either side of the duopoly regardless of registration. The media will count delegates but they won’t hear the results of any preliminary, first-choice votes, only final tallies after “unviable” candidates have been excluded.

There’s no incumbent running for the White House in 2016 so caucus participation will be up. Reporters will compare this cycle's numbers favorably to years in which there was an incumbent, and they often will not provide full context. They won't compare the overall voting numbers to the voting population of the state of Iowa. To do so would be to reveal how many people have checked out and don't consider the top news story being repeated 24 hours a day on the news networks to be a top story. They won’t talk about why so many people stayed home. The story on the Democratic side will be about Clinton only, and if you think they aren't saying much about Bernie that night, consider how much less they'll be talking about him come October. He assured his irrelevance when he chose to oppose Clinton on in her own home field instead of in the general election.

Pollsters have been hassling Iowans on our phones for decades, and they always ask us two questions. They obsess over our answers to the second one, and basically skip over the first. But the first one would be fascinating as hell if they chose to probe it. The second one, of course, is "who are you planning to caucus for?", but the preceeding one always is "do you plan on participating in the caucus?" If you say no to that one, they're done with you, but the disgruntled and disinterested have a story to tell also. We don't agree to legitimize something we consider illegitimate. We believe in the axiom that if God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates. And a representative government.

We don't vote so we don't matter, right? The price we pay, right? Maybe, but not for the price of telling a false story. And we are heard when we take to the streets and protest Wall Street crimes, or a child of color shot dead by one of the oligarchy's storm troopers. Then you look at the video and say, where did they all come from? They've been under your nose, ignored.

posted by CM @ 8:16 PM