Iowa - WTF?

After months of waiting to see how the Democratic Party would sort out the candidates running for the party's presidential nomination - now down to eleven - we finally have an idea of how it's going to happen.  It isn't.

 A computer glitch involving an application that the Iowa Democratic Party bought to compute the results did not, in fact, compute, and the result is no result.  There isn't a single result available anywhere, allowing all of the major candidates to claim victory and allowing Donald Trump to mock the Democrats over their concern for electoral integrity and their ability to manage the government when they can't even manage a caucus.  The candidates have moved on to New Hampshire, which is on the eleventh of February, and the Iowa results should be Iowa results should be available by the twelfth . . . of never.

Trump is at a high-water mark now; the stock market is up again - (with many investors gleeful over the idea that the Democrats may not win the White House in November because they'll be seen as competent in handling the economy as they are at handling an election), his approval rating is up, his State of the Union address is tonight, and he'll likely be acquitted in the impeachment trial tomorrow.  Democrats are still in the dark as to who their nominee will be, and there's nothing but confusion as the candidates attempt to move forward.

I recently lamented on social media and in private conversation that the press has turned democracy into show business, equating the suspense of who would win Iowa with the suspense over who shot J.R. Ewing on "Dallas."  That observation turned out to be rather prescient; the suspense over that national phenomenon forty years ago was perpetuated by a Screen Actors Guild strike, delaying the resolution of the cliffhanger by two months. But at least in that case there was a script; the Democratic Party in Iowa is making things up as they go.

Let's be clear, though; the national Democratic Party isn't at fault, just the state party.  (Donald Trump won the Republican caucus, but that had less to do with Republican competence than with the fact that he ran virtually unopposed.)  This is incompetence that dwarfs vote-counting problems in Florida, because votes in Florida ultimately get reported.

Iowa shouldn't even go first in nominating presidential candidates anyway.  Its caucus system, like everything else in Iowa, is antiquated, and its white rural population doesn't reflect the multi-racial urbanized American population at large.  It was so confusing for both parties back in 2016 that, for awhile, no one was really sure who won on either side; this time, on the contested Democratic side, we don't even know who lost.

As for waiting for the Iowa results, well, to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, don't waste your time waiting all your life for a moment that just won't come.