Michael Barone has a thoughtful piece on the Iowa caucus in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. He writes in “As Iowa Goes, So Goes Iowa” that the Iowa caucus often doesn’t decide who wins the primary, let alone the general election.

Iowa Republican caucuses have a poor record in choosing their party’s nominees. In the five presidential nominating cycles with active Iowa Republican caucus competition, the Hawkeye State has voted for the eventual Republican nominee only twice—in 1996 for Bob Dole, in 2000 for George W. Bush—and only once was the Iowa winner elected president.

Part of the issue Barone notes is just how few Republicans actually participate.

In a state of three million people, a bare 119,000 Republicans showed up for the caucuses [in 2008]. Some 60% of them identified as evangelical or born-again Christians—a far higher percentage than in any presidential contest in any large non-Southern state that year.

By contrast, in the 2010, over 600,000 Iowa Republicans voted in the general election and more than 200,000 voted in the gubernatorial primary. This year fewer Republicans will vote in the Iowa caucus, despite a deeply unpopular incumbent Democratic party.

Why are so few Republicans showing up to vote in Iowa? Perhaps it’s because the Iowa Republican caucus is for insiders.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Dan McLaughlin to discuss why the 2012 presidential race won’t be a repeat of 1996, and tonight’s State of the Union.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Why 2012 Is Not 1996
Too Moderately Moderate
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Chilling thought for the day.  Recall the election of 1948, when the  Republican Party’s heavily-favored, moderate and uninspiring nominee lost to Truman in a race in which he was heavily favored to win.  The tragedy is not that the Chicago Tribune got the headline wrong, but that the American people lost either way given the choice between a left-leaning Republican and a slightly right-leaning Democrat.  To see how much we have learned from history, here is a pop quiz.

If you cannot answer any of the following questions, you are ill-prepared for 2012.

Leading up to the 1996 Presidential election, anytime Republicans were gathered, from Young Republicans to State Committees, anywhere in the Country, including Kansas, one candidate was the hands down favorite, usually with double the votes of the second pick.

Who was the darling of the Republican Party in 1996?

(hint: Pat Buchanan was usually second)

In 1964, Barry Goldwater won a primary victory defeating among others, Governor George Romney.

What book is credited with helping the Conservative Goldwater break the grip of the moderate wing that opposed him?

Who was the second, and only other Republican in the last century to defy the statist wing of the Republican Party and wrest the Presidential nomination?

In her book A Choice Not an Echo (1964), Phyllis Schlafly names the dates, places and attendees of the meetings as she details how the Republican Presidential nominees are always hand-picked by a small, elite cadre’ thus relegating loyal Republican activists to “echoing” the pre-selection rather than exercising their birthright “choice”.   The housewife-turned-activist Schlafly, was horrified to see the kingmakers actively manipulating the process in an attempt to steal the nomination away from the legitimate Republican popular candidate, Barry Goldwater.  She rushed tens of thousands of copies of her book to Convention delegates who then stood with Goldwater to win the battle, if not the war.

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The retirement of Evan Bayh is the latest heralding of difficult 2010 election year for the Democrats.  It is also a symptom of Obama’s mid 40s approval rating.  Smart Democrats know that the average midterm election year losses for the President’s party, when his approval rating is below 50%, is 41 seats in the House.  Three Presidents in the modern era suffered such a fate – Johnson, Ford and Bill Clinton.  Of those three, only Clinton went on to win a second term.  While it is likely Obama will suffer huge mid-term losses, it is more than unlikely that he will enjoy Clinton’s revival.

Clinton suffered the loss of 54 House seats in his first midterm election, despite a growing economy, because he broke his middle class tax cut promise – and the Republicans were smart enough to unanimously oppose that and run on the Contract With America.  Despite the loss of the House for the first time in 40 years, Clinton won reelection.

Clinton was able to win reelection in part because Bob Dole was not an effective candidate for the Republicans on the tax issue.  Clinton also famously triangulated in 1995 and 1996 with the help of longtime strategist Dick Morris.  Dropping ideology for practicality, in 1995 and 1996, Clinton pushed a national campaign to prevent teen pregnancy, issued an order clarifying the rights of religious expression in schools,  supported uniforms for public schools, banned human cloning, signed Megan’s law and welfare reform to name a few less than ideological triangulations.  Even before that, Clinton incurred the wrath of unions by pushing the ratification of NAFTA.

Of course, as the Governor of a swing state, Bill Clinton leaned an early lesson in pragmatism after he was defeated in his bid for a second term.  After apologizing for the policies that led to his reelection defeat, he regained the governorship and went on to enact mandatory competency testing for teachers and granted tax breaks to businesses – again with triangulating guru Dick Morris by his side.

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