January 3, 2008
Posted: 08:20 PM ET
(CNN) — I’ll be doing on-air “analysis” for CNN through the evening. In preparation, I‘ve been doing what I’ve always done as a reporter when I’m not out talking to people in person — working the phones. Usually I do that in my office in midtown Manhattan, a private and reasonably commodious outpost. But I haven’t done it from a newsroom (a huge one in the case of CNN’s New York operations) in a long time, and I must say it’s a nice feeling to be in a sea of reporters and editors and folks running around with the urgency that daily journalism demands, especially on a big story, which the Iowa caucuses– justifiably or not — have become. (What seems unjustifiable is the disproportionate role of Iowa and New Hampshire in picking the President of the United States, an anomaly that ought to end after this year’s circus: No matter how diligent the citizens of these two small states — and they tends towards diligent-plus in these matters — the outsized role of two tiny provinces and their tiny populations is certainly is not the what ‘One-person, One-vote’ was supposed to mean…..Another subject for another day, but definitely part of the bizarre dynamic of whatever occurs tonight.)
The peculiar Iowa dynamic includes the arcane rules — and permissible horse-trading, perhaps — of the caucus system, in which there are no secret ballots, and people are herded across the room to declare their preference for president of the United States. Hence, the following speculative morsel I picked up on the phone in a conversation with one Democratic candidate’s (obviously not Hillary Clinton) deputy in Iowa: his particular anti-Hillary camp’s expectation—or hope—that many caucus goers may be downright reluctant to be visibly observed by friends and neighbors as favoring Clinton. This reasoning (or wishful thinking) runs particularly strong regarding caucus goers who have initially favored a candidate who fails to reach the required 15 percent threshold. The supporters of such a failing candidate, under the theory explained to me, would be under especially heavy peer pressure, given the importance of their second-choice, and the high stakes generally of what is involved in this evening’s event. Thus (under the theory put forward) these individuals under intense observation in the caucus pen would rather not spend the rest of the political season being identified in their neighborhoods and community as the ones who threw their votes to Hillary Clinton, about whom antagonistic feelings of more than a few Democrats, not just Republicans, run high. (The so-called “polarizing factor.”) Interesting. –CNN Analyst Carl Bernstein Filed under: Iowa |
 
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