The Misanthropy State: Don’t Make Too Much of Iowa

By PLS

When all candidates are males, the Iowa caucus process probably serves as a good straw in the electoral wind. But that assumption must be considered gone with the wind, now that the leading Democratic candidate is a woman. It won’t be a fair contest in a miserably misanthropic state.

Iowa has no female Senators. Never has. It doesn’t even have a female Member of Congress. Never has. Iowa has never had a female governor either. Female Lieutenant governors can’t crack the granite ceiling.

Mistrust in female leadership is crumbling throughout the U.S., and it isn’t even a pervasive middle western bias. Iowa’s neighbors manage to elect women to top posts. Kansas and Michigan currently have female governors, for example. As for Senators, there are female incumbents from Michigan, Missouri and Minnesota. In the House Ohio, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Michigan are represented by one or more females. And so on.

This being the case, results from the Iowa caucuses will have to be very carefully analyzed. Obviously, if Hillary Clinton wins big, it will be an extraordinary accomplishment.

If she loses by anything but a humiliating margin, the winning candidates should in no way be considered to represent political preferences in other states or to represent a momentum that can be recapitulated elsewhere. Iowa should not be seen to give any male candidate a lock on the nomination.

In short, journalists who write as if Iowa is a microcosm of the US in 2007 will be doing us all a great disservice.

Will political reporters have the sociological savvy to properly interpret the electoral preferences of this state?

For that matter, to what extent can any of them rise above the unsavory bitch or bimbo stereotypes that women know so well?

Comments

[zenpundit]

"If she loses by anything but a humiliating margin, the winning candidates should in no way be considered to represent political preferences in other states or to represent a momentum that can be recapitulated elsewhere. Iowa should not be seen to give any male candidate a lock on the nomination."

I disagree. Hillary is not viewed as " a female candidate" by the country as she is Hillary *Clinton*, known quantity and the designated candidate of the party leadership and DLC types. She transcends gender to a degree as Obama does with race.