Why Iowa shouldn't vote first anymore

Here’s where the experience of 2012 should be most damning for Iowa’s privileged place. The mythology of the caucuses is based on close personal contact between voters and candidates. In theory, the candidates traverse the state’s plains and cornfields to let voters size them up at close range, to test them and take their measure in coffee shops and meeting halls where people live plain and simple — and political spin just doesn’t fly.

But the candidates who have spent the most time and effort on the state, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum (who has famously visited each of the state’s 99 counties, the poor man), are reaping precious few rewards in the polls. The caucus frontrunners, by contrast, haven’t really played by Iowa’s rules. Mitt Romney spent most of 2011 avoiding the state. Newt Gingrich campaigned there sporadically until his surge, and even then has showed his respect by leaving at critical moments. Then there’s Ron Paul, who may win the caucuses with a small plurality while peddling a foreign policy message totally unacceptable to most of the state’s Republicans.

So why have these candidates risen to the top? Because the entire Iowa campaign has tracked the national one. Iowa’s procession of frontrunners — Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Gingrich, Paul — has roughly mirrored the boom-and-bust pattern found in national polls.