Spectacular Democrat stuff-up in Iowa validates Donald Trump

The unbelievable cock-up in Iowa simply proves the Democrats are hopeless.

Pete Buttigieg, an aspiring moderate, thinks he won. But he didn’t get to make even a provisional victory statement until well after midnight. Picture: AFP

What an unbelievable cock-up by the Iowa Democrats!

The old Australian insult — to say of someone that they couldn’t organise a chook raffle in a pub — normally has an element of irony or exaggeration.

The Iowa Democrats demonstrated exactly that indeed they literally cannot organise a chook raffle in a school hall.

Iowa has been running caucuses for decades. It has a privileged position in the US primaries schedule. It’s a small state. Candidates are expected to meet real voters in retail political events. It is a distinctive and in many ways praiseworthy tradition in American politics.

It allows a candidate to catch fire. It allows someone without the biggest funding to break through. It creates that most elusive and unstoppable quality in politics — momentum.

None of that happened in this Iowa caucus because the Democratic Party made a comprehensive mess of conducting, counting and reporting the caucus results.

Pete Buttigieg, an aspiring moderate, thinks he won. But he didn’t get to make even a provisional victory statement until well after midnight east coast US time, when no one but political tragics are watching.

What if he didn’t win? What if he did? Either way the outcome is a travesty.

Much more than that, the whole cockamamie mess plays into the central narrative of Donald Trump: that the Democrats are irredeemably, hopelessly incompetent.

The Democrat Caucus is an unmitigated disaster. Nothing works, just like they ran the Country. Remember the 5 Billion Dollar Obamacare Website, that should have cost 2% of that. The only person that can claim a very big victory in Iowa last night is “Trump”.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 4, 2020

To exalt over this in his State of the Union address will be a temptation he surely won’t resist. The only plus for the Democrats is that their staggering incompetence may make him overconfident. How can Democrats claim Trump debauches the electoral process when they cannot even run their own internal party elections?

The spectacular debacle validates all of Trump’s claims about the Democrats. Indeed, the Democrats constantly confirm Trump’s central narrative about the Democrats. He argues, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that the Democrats are no better than he is ethically but much more incompetent and untrustworthy with important interests. And the Democrats keep bending every effort to prove Trump right.

The Democrat Party in Iowa really messed up, but the Republican Party did not. I had the largest re-election vote in the history of that great state, by far, beating President Obama’s previous record by a lot. Also, 97% Plus of the vote! Thank you Iowa!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 4, 2020

Joe Biden, who seems to have done less well in Iowa than he had hoped, immediately cast doubt on the process, its integrity, its numbers. That Biden response is overwhelmingly Trumpian in spirit.

So just how sacred is the Democratic Party’s allegedly passionate concern for the integrity of US democracy, allegedly on display at the Trump impeachment trial?

Americans on the whole haven’t watched the impeachment proceedings, which have unfolded in an entirely partisan way. The public has mostly seen the impeachment process as just more Washington insider politics.

When will the Democrats start blaming RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, instead of their own incompetence for the voting disaster that just happened in the Great State of Iowa?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 4, 2020

But as Bob Hawke used to say to devastating effect about the Liberal Party: if you can’t govern your own party, you can’t govern the nation.

This Iowa debacle is so comprehensive, so embarrassing, that it may well feature in Republican ads leading up to the November election.

Trump can claim, honestly, that he has the economy humming along, with a big jobs boom and rising wages. And the people who claim he is a threat to all Americans can’t even count people voting in school halls in an internal party ballot.

The Democratic primaries are really two battles within the larger battle.

Biden, Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar are all vying to be the leading moderate. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are vying to be the leading leftist, in Sanders’s case avowedly socialist, of the party. Winning the internal battle early could be enormously beneficial for any of the candidates. If you’re the only moderate facing two leftists, you’re advantaged. If you’re the only leftist facing two moderates, advantage goes to you.

If your whole party cannot count, relies on untried apps that fail, has no timely back-up and demonstrates massive incompetence the first time it has authority over anything, then it actually makes Trump look sober, calm and reliable. Trump looks like the adult in the room. Those Democrats are a piece of work.