Opinion : There’s no hiding it: Iowa Democrats lost big with caucus decision

By Dave Nagle, Iowa Capital Dispatch

Iowa Democratic Party leaders returned last week from St. Louis where the fate of the Iowa Caucuses' first-in-the-nation status was determined. Iowa Democratic Party chair Rita Hart and others proclaimed a great victory in that Iowa will no longer host a competitive presidential contest to lead off the nominating season.

Instead, they traded this honored spot for permission to hold a meeting. Having lost their pants, we Democrats should be grateful they were allowed to come home in their underwear.

But we are reassured that having the caucus reduced to a simple party organizing function, which we do every year anyway, will enable us to focus on a new objective. We are going to devote our efforts to "electing Democrats."

We need to be honest: The party lost, rural America lost, and the nation lost to a new nominating process that will place more and more emphasis on money and less on presidential candidates being measured by personal, one-on-one, interaction with voters. Saying that we are going to start anew and focus on electing Democrats implies that the party hasn't been doing this for the last 40 years, when we had the caucuses and won our fair share.

I guess we best call up former Sen. Tom Harkin, the author of the American with Disabilities Act, and tell him he never was elected. Alert Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack that he was not governor for two terms, and Leonard Boswell's heirs will be surprised that he never served multiple terms in Congress. Mike Gronstal was never Iowa Senate majority leader, Don Avenson didn't rule the Iowa House for six years as speaker and change the name of all the federally funded projects that Neil Smith brought home to Iowa, including the money that helped rebuild the state after the flood of '93.

So here is the first of the items the party lost: the strengthening of the Iowa Democratic Party by the presence of presidential candidates, and their money and staff brought to Iowa over the years. For example, I can remember watching how state Sen. Eric Giddens benefited by having every presidential candidate contribute resources, staff, and presence to enable him to win a special election in March of 2019.

Instead of working to be more competitive, we are going to be left with a party and our candidates to compete against a GOP with a massive financial advantage that will be extremely difficult to overcome.

But there may be an even greater diminishment when one considers the fact that Iowa was the only representative of a rural state in the early nominating process to select the party nominee to be the president of the United States. We sit in a state, like the others that border us, and watch our rural hospitals close or see a new lower standard of medical care for citizens of small towns. We regret, but are now powerless to stop, our small-town schools struggling to find adequate funding to fully fulfill their mission because the money is diverted to private educational institutions.

We are told we should worry more about which bathroom a person chooses to use and what sports they should be allowed to participate in based on their perceived gender. We pride ourselves on banning books. We will have to instruct the female voter to call her state senator or representative "doctor," since the Legislature will make her most intimate health care decisions for her.

By reforming child labor laws, our kids will skip school to work in our hog slaughtering and chicken plucking factories. Now, no would-be presidential contender will grace our land to argue against these conditions. This is the existing order of life in farmland.

Of course, there are reasons why the governor of New Hampshire held a celebratory press conference when he learned that his state would hold the first contest in the Democratic Party. Iowa has been eliminated. But there is also reason to hope, because at least the early date was saved for party organization.

While a mistake of major proportions has been made, nothing, except our will, precludes us from returning to the top of the heap in 2028. The party has good leadership and is for the most part working to restore Iowa to a two-party state.

On this issue, however, calling St. Louis a victory is simply an attempt to hide what we lost. But we can get back with some backbone.