Joseph Lane: The Iowa Caucus: Chicanery or Democracy?
Source: Britannica Blog (1-7-08) [Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry. ] Last week in Iowa, on election night, I was a neutral observer in a very polite little caucus. I stood at the back of a high school Spanish classroom with posters illustrating simple concepts and phrases en espanol. My favorite was a sketch of a thermometer with only a little tiny band of red crossing near zero. Hace Frio, it read, and wasnt that the truth? Iowa was bitter cold this caucus week. As I drove through snow-covered neighborhoods, I wondered whether we might come across the immobile forms of parka-wearing college students, flash frozen where they conferred on the sidewalks with clipboards in their hands, an ice sculpture form of human statuary A Study in Canvassing to commemorate the efforts required to move a democracy. The real risk of frostbite notwithstanding, nearly 240,000 Democrats went to their caucus sites. In my own
