POLITICO.COM : The Ames Iowa Death Star will kill some candidates - "This straw poll is organized bribery on a grand scale" - "A delightful fraud, an amiable hoax, that most people in Iowa don’t care about, but the national media eat up”

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To its credit, there is no man behind the curtain. Its fraudulence is open and above board:

Ames is a Death Star : The media want winners and losers very, very early. They do not want to have to pretend that large numbers of candidates are equally important and equally deserving of coverage or inclusion in debates.

POLITICO.COM
Ames is the GOP's Grim Reaper
By ROGER SIMON
August 9, 2011


Ames is the GOP's Grim Reaper


Some excerpts :

Presidential campaigns buy up large blocks of tickets, hand them out, give Iowans free food, free drinks, free fun rides, free music, free T-shirts and free body-painting to show up at the Hilton Coliseum on the campus of Iowa State University.

All that the people are expected to do in return is listen to speeches by Republican presidential candidates. So you can see why people have to be bribed to show up.

Ideally, people would listen to the speeches and then cast ballots for the Republican of their choice. The term “straw poll” comes from the British jurist John Selden (1584-1654), who wrote, “Take a straw and throw it up into the Air – you may see by that which way the Wind is.”

But the Wind at Ames blows. And that is because people can cast their ballots hours before the speeches even begin. The campaigns do not expect people to be swayed by the speeches. They expect that once people are bought, they will stay bought.

But the campaigns do not know Iowans. Iowans are fair-minded and good-hearted, and the Ames Straw Poll, which will be held this Saturday, is good fun to them, not serious politics.

Only the media treat it seriously, and only after writing for weeks and weeks about how meaningless it is.

As The Washington Post put it Tuesday, “The results are not very reliable in predicting who will win the Iowa caucuses, the GOP nomination, or ultimately, the presidency.”

Which is 100 percent correct and which is why about 700 members of the media are expected to show up at Ames on Saturday, why network superstars will be among them and why the press is already doing projected weather reports: 81 degrees, partly cloudy, no locusts.

Why do the media care so much about something that means almost nothing?

So when the media report who does poorly at Ames, those candidates’ money will dry up, the candidates will drop out and the media will feel justified paying attention to only the top tier. (Unless, of course, some of the top tier wisely choose to skip Ames, which some are doing this year.)

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