Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

Because of my job, I am not able to participate directly in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses. I can, however, see candidates, and I saw nearly a dozen of them in this election cycle — so many that some have dropped out already. (Walker, Perry, Kasich, Graham in passing, Huckabee, Rubio, Clinton, O’Malley, Cruz, Sanders, Fiorina. Ironically, not Santorum this campaign cycle, despite his virtually camping out in the state. Paul had to cancel an appearance at Cornell College and Jindal ended his campaign the day before he was supposed to be in Tama.)

Some quick thoughts:

• Newest “must have” for candidates: A “body person” whose job is to hold the phone/camera and take pictures of people with the candidate in the post-speech part of the event. Works wonders for speed and cuts down on the need for posing for selfies.
• Remember, Democrats must publicly state their preference by gathering in groups; Republicans have some speechifying and then a secret ballot. What effect will the two different styles have on the results?
• Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords probably deserves another look as a system of government.
• @smod2016 is the candidate we both need and deserve.

In closing, with an eye on what happened in 2008, the traditional election official’s prayer: “Dear Lord, please, let the winner win big.”

UPDATE: One more candidate. One more yuuuuugge candidate.

UPDATE 2: eep (and one of them appears to be in Tama County)

Spot the missing word:

Whether you prefer to read siouxcityjournal.com on your laptop, tablet or phone, our new design gives you an optimal viewing experience tailored to your digital device of choice.

Give up? It’s “desktop”. The SCJ and the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier have made their websites “much more visual”, which is code for “optimized for mobile”, which is code for “You want to read TEXT? On a MONITOR? So passe. Silly oldthinker.”

On one full-size browser window, the Courier’s website shows 10 headlines, and that shrinks to five if the window is less than 1000 pixels wide. By contrast, the Quad-City Times, still using the old Lee website design, shows seven in a “quick clicks” line, five in a rotating window, and seven in a vertical list of headlines.

Because “it’s not cool unless there’s a graffiti festival” is a New York value.

In the late period of caucus season, the coastal media has a habit of rediscovering Iowa in “wow, we found pockets of civilization here” articles and perspective pieces. Take, for example, this piece in the New York Times Travel section. Now, in Politico, Colin Woodard — you may recognize his name from an earlier blog post about another Politico piece of his that defended Iowa’s leading political role but had multiple errors — has this to say about the state capital: “How America’s Dullest City Got Cool.”

Des Moines, the dullest city in the United States? How does one even quantify that? (Lubbock must have been unavailable for comment.)

Woodard’s article covers the good things that have happened to downtown Des Moines in the past couple of decades, but spends a good deal of time on the things that the rest of the state, and perhaps many in the metro area itself, either don’t care about (if thinking about them at all) or regard with distaste. Richard Florida is quoted, so give me a moment while my eyeballs complete a rotation in their sockets, and there’s some skywalk-bashing for good measure.

Near the end there’s this pair of sentences: “That said, Des Moines has a long way to go before anyone will call it the next Austin, Texas. Most people coming here are still Iowans or those married to them.” Des Moines could be even cooler if it weren’t for all those Iowans!

For the flip side of this (of sorts), we can turn to a Politico article from the same day about Des Moines’ lawsuit against rural counties over water quality. Taken together, the two tell a fuller story about Iowa’s increasing rural-urban split, and ask the question, “What price coolness?”