{"id":12692,"date":"2011-12-21T09:26:48","date_gmt":"2011-12-21T14:26:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=12692"},"modified":"2011-12-21T09:26:48","modified_gmt":"2011-12-21T14:26:48","slug":"panic-in-iowa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/12\/21\/panic-in-iowa\/","title":{"rendered":"Panic in Iowa"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Panic, at least, for the Republican establishment who are facing a <a href=\"http:\/\/www2.macleans.ca\/?p=230702&#038;preview=true\" target=\"_blank\">full-scale Paulista Revolutionary outbreak<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<p><em>What has me concerned is that on Main Street Iowa people are coming up to me and saying, \u2018What do you think about Dr. Paul?\u2019 These are folks who have to be informed. They have to get past the 30- and 60-second ads. If you ask Iowans if they\u2019re for legalizing marijuana or legalizing heroin, they\u2019d say no. But Dr. Paul has said on many occasions that that\u2019s OK. But people don\u2019t all know that.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I\u2019m not sure whether to be delighted or depressed by the reaction of Iowa Republicans like Andy Cable to the suddenly-real possibility that Ron Paul might win &mdash; and thereby discredit! &mdash; the state\u2019s first-in-the-nation nominating caucuses. The anomalous importance of Iowa within the U.S. election system has traditionally been defended on two major grounds: (a), that the state is pretty representative of the American \u201cmiddle\u201d in both geographic and demographic senses, and (b), that a small state like Iowa (or New Hampshire) can scrutinize candidates with a salutary close-up intensity, given a long pre-election period in which to do it.<\/p>\n<p>There is no doubt something to these arguments. (Along with obvious rebuttals to both.) But how can a major party have its cake and eat it too? Specifically, how can the concept of Iowa\u2019s special mission as a testing range for candidates be reconciled with Mr. Cable\u2019s panicky Yuletide talk of uninformed goon voters flying off the handle? Cable\u2019s state has benefited significantly from being a political bellwether, both from the quadrennial media activity and attention and from the political pork that follows. (Ethanol accounts for 9% of the state\u2019s GDP.) Yet Cable is not even waiting for Paul to be nominated before undermining the whole basis for taking Iowa seriously.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Panic, at least, for the Republican establishment who are facing a full-scale Paulista Revolutionary outbreak: What has me concerned is that on Main Street Iowa people are coming up to me and saying, \u2018What do you think about Dr. Paul?\u2019 These are folks who have to be informed. They have to get past the 30- [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,28,53,13],"tags":[119,188,719,83,289,419],"class_list":["post-12692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-drugs","tag-electionwatch","tag-iowa","tag-marijuana","tag-polls","tag-ronpaul"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3iI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12692"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12693,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12692\/revisions\/12693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}