Letters to the Editor
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Iowa is important
Iowa also matters because the candidates have to actually meet people and speak to them - instead of just phoning it in through tv ads - and the people actually take meeting the candidates seriously - instead of basing their vote on same tv ads.
Having seen the presidential campaigns up close in a small state like Iowa and a big state like Michigan, I'll take Iowa and New Hampshire first any day.
The crybabies demanding to strip IA and NH of their "first" status in the name of "fairness" will someday get what they ask for, but it won't be what they actually wanted, and it certainly won't be an improvement.
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suspicious of Iowa
Iowa is the place where Howard Dean got torpedoed. A smart authentic public servant who tells it straight was too much for them. They don't have my respect.
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I wouldn't trust my neighbors to walk my dog
Regular guys, my butt. Do we really believe than anyone in a flannel shirt is Socrates?
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I have the same nostalgia...
...for small mysteries and celebrations, and the physicality of dirt, sun, and children. Cars and cubicles cut us off from all that.
I feel it like a memory of the scents of things. We leave our noses in childhood unless we make appointments with them for things like roses or wine.
I remember the important of dust motes in beams of sun coming into a quiet room. I remember drapes instead of window treatments. I think granite in kitchens is cold and creepy.
While the guys murmur in the driveway, now and then when she can pause to take a breath, a sweating woman leans her belly into a sink and wishes she could go outside, climb into the crown of an apple tree, and not come down until the world turns right.
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Nostalgia for what?
Chewing the fat? Shooting the breeze?
Talking about cars, and mulching? Please, let's not malign "manly."
How are these people caught in the amber of an America from a 1947 magazine cover better able to see through candidates and pick the best one?
Look who they picked the last time. Red victories covered the upper and lower Midwest. They pick a guy who wears flannel and drives a big old truck, fakes being a cowboy and talks nonsense full time.
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GK, I'll Be Your Flyswatter
God, where would we be without cynics? Mencken lives and we are all the poorer for it. A guy like Keillor draws them like flies, especially in a place like Salon. Insects. Bugs. Flies. Pains in the ass, and disrespectful ones at that.
Man, I must really be getting old, because some of the first few responses to this particular ponder by GK really pissed me off. Now I'll get to listen to them ridicule my pissed-offedness and that will only invigorate me in my senility, because I, too, remember (and not from the damned, perfect midwest, either, but the greater Washington, DC area) driveway philosophers -- like my step grandfather and his neighbors -- who were closer to both heaven and earth than most "adults" I've known in the past 30 years or so. People who, on another continent would have been Hindu mystics or Zen monks but here were just some grownup guys, the elders, getting into the zone about what's real, about what matters. I'm not sure Iowa even has any of them anymore. They may not exist anywhere but in my memory and Keillor's and a few others from the Silent Generation, but they did once walk the earth, and we could still learn from them via oral tradition, except that is so 20th Century! Sick of hearing about the people who saved the world? Well you didn't hear it from them. Someone somewhere in between tried to give them their due and now they are just a bad dream to the various generations of the self-absorbed who were raised by my generation and those damned Baby Boomers.
Those guys, if they still exist, are more than just some "red staters" who elected our Idiot-in-Chief. Those guys would never have voted for a guy in a flannel shirt, simply because they wore flannel shirts themselves and they believed a President should be someone presidential and not like them. They may have created the gulf between the governing class and the people by their own modesty, but they were nothing like the turkeys and sheep who put Bush & Co. in the White House.
Sometimes being able to remember what it was like to be a kid and live an idyllic life really sucks. But only when it gets brought up in a discussion.
Cynics. That's what we've got to look forward to in our old age, GK, a bunch of digital Menckens. God help us.
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Almost no one votes in the Iowa caucus
Few people are aware of just how poor the turnout is in Iowa. It is so low that I don't think Iowa deserves its position; they should forfeit it on the basis of overwhelming apathy.
See http://elections.gmu.edu/Voter_Turnout_2004_Primaries.htm .
The number of eligible Iowa voters is estimated at a hair under 2.2 million, but only 133,353 people actually bothered to vote, even after being inundated with months of campaigning, with major issues (e.g. Iraq war: thumbs up or thumbs down?) at stake. That's 6.1 percent!
So Mr. Keillor is, I'm afraid, wrong. If they know which candidate is real, they don't give a damn, and 94% of them do not vote.
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Flannel on our shoulders, but not in our heads...
Gee, I live in the heart of the Midwest, Weeping Willow, and I'm not sure where all those Red victories you talk about happened. Not in Minnesota. Nor Wisconsin. Michigan? nope.
Illinois? No, we're pretty Blue. Iowa barely more Red than Blue, yes, and Ohio by a handful. Oh, and Indiana; well yes, Indiana's Red. Still, most of us here in the Midwest didn't fall for George and his crew either time. And I know some of those driveway philosophers, by the way; they wear flannel shirts as I do in the winter and they go hunting and they have beatup pickups and not much money. And a lot of them see right through this crowd of thugs. In my little town surrounded by cornfields, working men and women still like the Democrats. And they talk about it in their driveways leaning on their trucks. And I'm for that.