Now Where's My Sandwich With Pork, White Bread, and Mayo?

From Instapundit's blog:

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE GOES ALL California-superior on Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. "How is it that we persist in allowing these unrepresentative, yahoo infested, pissant states [to] decide who gets to run for President?"

Now that's not very nice. But I think the answer is, to piss off Californians and New Yorkers, something that the rest of the country agrees on . . . .

UPDATE: Bainbridge is guestblogging at Andrew Sullivan's place, for those who missed it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Related thoughts from Ed Driscoll.

What's one of the unrepresentative, yahoo infested, pissant states he's talking about?

Of course, it's Iowa.

There's nothing like a general dissing of Iowans to wake me from my month-long retirement vacation from blogging.

So Prof Bainbridge says that Iowa isn't representative of the rest of the country?

Let's take a look at some recent numbers.

The 2004 Presidential Election:

USA: Bush 50.7%, Kerry 48.3%
Iowa: Bush 49.9%, Kerry 49.23%
Cali: Bush 44.43%, Kerry 54.41%


The 2000 Presidential Election:

USA: Bush 47,9%, Gore 48.4%
Iowa: Bush 48.22%, Gore 48.54%
Cali: Bush 41.65%, Gore 53.45%


The 1996 Presidential Election:

USA: Dole 40.7%, Clinton 49.2%
Iowa: Dole 39.92%, Clinton 50.26%
Cali: Dole 38.21%, Clinton 51.1%


The 1992 Presidential Election:

USA: Bush 37.4%, Clinton 43%
Iowa: Bush 37.27%, Clinton 43.28%
Cali: Bush 32.61%, Clinton 46.01%


You can plainly see that Iowans end up voting very similarly to the percentage outcome in the overall Presidential election.

As for California, especially in 2000 and 2004? Ehhhhh........ Not even close, bud!

Now back to Bainbridge's other ridiculous statements:

Iowa? A population of less than 3 million, that at 96+% white is utterly unrepresentative of the country as a whole?

This sort of complaint has been going on for years, mostly by either Howard Dean or Peter Beinart. The thing is, both Dean and Beinart are correct about getting rid of Iowa's first-in-the-nation status for the caucuses, but for the wrong reasons.

Instead of counting Iowans by the color of their skin because of how the descendants of all those German, English, Irish, Italian, French, Croat, Czech, Slovak, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, et al, have assimilated in Iowa over the past 100-150 years (at the turn of the 20th century there were still many different foreign language newspapers being printed and distributed within Iowa), perhaps Prof Bainbridge should be pointing out that the previous three winning Democratic Presidential candidates have all come from Southern states.

It's also a modern fact that the Democrats cannot win the White House without winning Southern states. Don't forget that Al Gore lost his "home" state in 2000. John Edwards did the same thing in 2004.

Now tell me, how is somebody like Hillary Clinton going to beat a bona-fide southern gentleman like Fred Thompson in the South? She can't. Same thing with Hawaii-to-Chicago native Barack Obama. And if John Edwards can't win South Carolina in 2004, how could be possibly win in 2008?

I do agree with Dean and Beinart that Iowa and New Hampshire shouldn't have a monopoly on being "first in the nation" with their caucus and primary. It's only a recent thing anyway (Iowa wasn't "first in the nation" until 1972). Good luck getting anybody to agree to changing it. The news media in Iowa, particularly the TV stations and the newspapers, won't want to give up that regular infusion of cash and celebrity elbow-rubbing easily.