http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-straw-poll-winner-barack-obama/2011/08/15/gIQAj4KYHJ_story.html?hpid=z2Strolling through the pageant of unhealthful food and unsound ideology that is the Iowa straw poll, amid the good-natured Republicans who swept Michele Bachmann to an impressive victory, I couldn’t help but reflect that this quadrennial exercise is one crazy way to pick a major-party candidate for president.
You’ll note that I used the words “Michele Bachmann” and “president” in the same sentence. That someone with views as extreme as Bachmann’s could win — and that Ron Paul, who seems to inhabit his own little reality, could finish second — would seem to rob the straw poll of all but comic value, making it analogous to the opening joke a speaker might tell to warm up a stone-faced audience. But the ritual is serious business, as poor Tim Pawlenty found out. Less than 24 hours after he finished a distant third in the straw poll, “former candidate” became his new honorific.
(snip)
The emergence of Bachmann and Perry as Romney’s chief rivals has shifted the GOP contest sharply to the right. This may fire up the Republican base, but it may also turn off independents who have made clear their distaste for uncompromising partisanship.
The Republican establishment, or what’s left of it, is nervous about this dynamic. But the establishment isn’t running the party anymore. The 16,892 Iowans who voted in the straw poll certainly didn’t intend to brighten Obama’s prospects of reelection, but that’s just what they might have accomplished.
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