Bloom describes Iowa as a state with major economic issues. A state which has few jobs to offer its students. A state with a very high suicide rate. Bloom writes “insular Iowa” is not representative of the country – it is 91 percent white!

According to Bloom, "There are two Iowas: The idealized version and the 'heartbreaking real version, full of 'laid-off rural factory workers, farmers who have lost their land to banks and agribusiness. The bulk of jobs are low-income ones most Iowans don’t want. Many have simply packed up and left the state which helps keep the unemployment rate statewide low. Those who stay in rural Iowa are often the elderly waiting to die, those too timid or lacking in education to peer around the bend for better opportunities, and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth.'”

Bloom writes, "Many Iowa media outlets are hesitant to debate the state’s large role in the presidential contests because they are engaged in 'booster journalism.' There is a financial incentive for the Iowa media not to rock the caucus boat… this is big money, this is the jackpot every four years.”

This is exactly why we should kill the Iowa caucuses.

The Iowa Caucuses are a scripted scam to attract visitors so they can be fleeced as they come to the nation's first presidential contest.

Yesterday morning, 49 percent of Iowans were undecided. On the surface, this seems absurd. What thunderbolt are caucus goers expecting to clarify their choice? After months of candidate jockeying, a dozen debates, thousands of ads and millions of dollars spent, how could Iowans not know which candidate they prefer the day before they vote?

The Iowa Caucuses are a meaningless scam to increase visitor dollars into the Iowa economy. All Iowans are schooled in the value of declaring "undecided" hyping the marketing scam to keep visitors coming to Iowa.

In a Des Moines Register poll published three days before the vote, fully 49 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers said they had not firmly made up their minds. This is what caused the extraordinary volatility in the polls and a parade of seven different front-runners, culminating in Tuesday’s virtual tie between Romney and Santorum, with Ron Paul just behind them.

Much of the political world has come to regard Iowans as idiots. The prospect indecisiveness could allow a gadfly such as Paul to win prompted many commentators to write Iowa obituaries: It could “do irreparable harm”, “discredit the Iowa caucuses” and perhaps bring about “the demise of Iowa.”

Bloom adds, "The Iowa Republicans’ indecision captures perfectly the existential struggle of Iowa white farmers. They don’t know what they want — or even who they are. Are they Tea Partyers? Isolationists? Pro-business? Populists? Moralists? Worried workers? Do they want the corporate caretaker (Romney), the oddball isolationist (Paul) or the cultural warrior (Santorum)?"

Tuesday night’s returns indicated Iowans never did make up their mind, as the three men carved up the vote almost evenly. A poll of voters entering the caucuses found nearly one in five said they hadn’t chosen a candidate until Tuesday.

Bloom thinks there's no actual reason why Iowa should go first. All the explanations you hear from Iowa party hacks and their enablers are post-hoc rationalizations for why Iowa should stay first.

The caucuses were moved to the front of the schedule essentially by accident in 1972. In 1976, Jimmy Carter, a dark horse candidate, committed himself to campaigning aggressively in what was still considered a political backwater and emerged a star. That alone should have been a warning sign. Instead the political press romanticized the place and started treating Iowa as special.

Jim Geraghty of National Review writes, "The chief complaint is how small the caucus-going electorate is. Iowa's total population is just about 3 million, but nowhere near that many people vote in the caucuses. On the GOP side, somewhere between 80,000 and 120,000 people show up. Turnout has never exceeded 23% of registered Republicans.  Iowa has .97% of the United States population."

And this doesn't even factor in the incandescent stupidity of the non-binding pseudo-event known as the Ames straw poll, which weeds out contenders months before the caucuses.

The problem with this demographic critique is you can make a similar complaint of any state. If New Mexico had been first in the nation since 1972, we'd all be familiar with the rich democratic traditions and civic-mindedness of New Mexicans. Journalists would tell war stories about Santa Fe instead of Des Moines. Washington D.C. would be filled with generations of grizzled New Mexico veterans selling their contacts, e-mail lists and homespun insights into the unique contours of the New Mexican political landscape. Meanwhile, people would laugh at the very suggestion Iowa — Iowa! — be given the pride of place in our precious electoral system.

The real problem with the Iowa caucuses is simply they confer too much entrenched arbitrary power on one state in perpetuity. For instance, without the Iowa caucuses we would never have wasted billions of dollars on environmentally damaging and economically wasteful ethanol subsidies.

It's nice Iowa is the Saudi Arabia of corn, but there's no reason for presidential aspirants to kowtow to Big Corn's interests every four years. Even worse, every politician who even fantasizes about sitting in the Oval Office pays obeisance to the preservation of government moonshine.

Iowans aren't especially greedy. Their sense of entitlement comes from 40 years of political pandering. And it's not that ethanol doesn't deserve a hearing in presidential contests, but why should it have so much more airtime than nuclear power or fisheries or crime?

Traditionally, critics on the left complain Iowa is too white, too rural and too Christian to have so much political clout.

Such complaints have merit, but they miss the point. Every state is special in some way. Nevada cares about gaming and water use more than, say, Idaho.

Washington could easily do away with Iowa's monopoly on being first. All congressmen and senators would jump at the opportunity to pass a federal law having all states on the same day hold a state election in everyone's state to vote for a Republican candidate for president and on another day, a Democrat candidate election would be held. This would take the selection process to two days to all states across the USA instead of continuing the charade in Iowa.

In Diverse & Urban Nation, Time to Kick Iowa White, Racist Farmers to Curb