Kicking the caucuses

You knew it was coming. From Reid Wilson in the National Journal:

Imagine an election with so many inaccuracies that officials declare a winner; then declare a tie; then declare another winner after two weeks. Imagine an election with rules so confusing that the media is barred from observing and the count takes two full days. Is this some Third World country rigging the count, in desperate need of election monitors? No - it's Iowa and Nevada, and this year, it's how the man who could be the next leader of the free world is being picked.

Thanks to movements inside both the Republican and Democratic national committees, 2012 may mark the end of this presidential nominating system. And Iowa and Nevada are the two states most likely to lose their coveted positions at the front of the calendar.

Wilson says Iowa's stumblin,' fumblin' count and Nevada's complete fiasco last weekend will prompt the parties to put more stable, dependable primaries up front in February and delegate curious caucuses to the electoral backbench.

Of course, hungry buzzards have circled Iowa's caucus carcass before, and yet the state has remained first. But the vote count problem ups the ante. It weakens the state's traditional defenses and the arguments against us sharpen. And because of it, as Wilson points out, the saturation media attention that feeds Iowa's role may not materialize like it has in the past.

On the other hand, the political media industrial complex needs 24-hour feeding, so the notion that reporters will ignore any human voting, even caucus voting, is a stretch. And there will be candidates who will show up if they think they can win and someone will notice. Missouri, Colorado and Minnesota were supposedly meaningless this week, and yet, Rick Santorum is getting a nice media boost for winning them.

And Iowa may enact reforms that convince outsiders that the previous unpleasantness is fixed. Some good ideas are already out there.

Still, if the parties are determined to put caucuses in a permanent penalty box, it could be game over. Due to a paperwork issue, which, as history teaches us, is really how all the great empires fall.