Baptism by Caucus

I was gently reminded today that here it is 5 days after the Iowa Caucuses and not one word has yet appeared on this blog about the experience! My excuses are many, but none very convincing, so let's just dive right in and rectify the oversight, shall we?

Here's a truism about Iowa's impact on presidential races: Iowa is not about who wins. It's about who gets knocked out. True, that. The winner of the Iowa caucus is most often NOT the next president, nor even the party's nominee. But campaigns sure do DIE here. And I guess the cross-border rivalry is also a truism. Apparently Iowans truly do not like Minnesotans (even if they were born here). So far, it's given the left boot of fellowship to the posteriors of both Tim Pawlenty and Michelle Bachman; take that, gophers.

----- Courtesy Des Moines Register

Here's how the campaign chair for Ron Paul put it. He said there are "three tickets out of Iowa [and] Ron Paul earned one of them."

Santorum and Romney earned the other two. Who will earn them in NH and SC is another matter altogether. I doubt it will be the exact same three. Seems like for all the disrespect Ron Raul got in the media (shunned like a political Hester Prynne), he did a solid job to finish with over 21%, with neither Santorum or Romney making it up to 25%. Plus, he won more counties than Romney (as shown in the map above by the orange shading). Proof, I guess, that his ground organization was solid, and that as his message finally got out, his support base grew (from the 8% he was running early in the race).

As a newbie to the kind of "retail politics" that happens in Iowa, I feel like it's been a pretty successful effort so far for me. As precinct captain for the campaign, seeing my guy come in second in my precinct only 4 votes back of Romney, was gratifying. So was being named Caucus Secretary (even though that meant my camera didn't get to record a thing - I was too busy filling out forms!) Plus, I got voted in as one of the three delegates from our precinct to the county convention, and got voted to the county central committee. All this while not really even being a Republican (except for a temporary registration ... this year, anyway ... which you can do here.)

So, diving in with both feet in order to fully experience the uniqueness of Iowa politics is working out just that way - a pretty full experience, including a trip to next month's Central Committee meeting and the following month's county convention. I'll report back, you can be sure of that.