When people talk about the contortions that Republican candidates have to go through to please The Base, they're not really talking about, say, South Carolina, which most intelligent observers realize stopped being representative of the United States some time in the 1830's. They're talking about the Iowa caucuses, which serve only to raise money for the state parties, and to deform the process of selecting a president before that process really gets rolling. It's like beginning the process of electing a pope at Chuck E. Cheese.
- Charles Pierce,
explaining why the Iowa caucuses are no longer a shining example of retail, grass-roots democracy (which they never were), or even a corn-fed, batter-fried joke (which they've long been), but a dysfunctional, unrepresentative system that relentlessly drives the Republican presidential candidates even further to the radical right than most of them these days already are, taking the center of gravity for the national campaign along with it.
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