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Vexing Iowa City blogger Wil Wilkinson has taken to The Economist‘s Democracy in America blog to post a defiant and stirring defense of Iowa’s (and New Hampshire’s) much-ballyhooed special status in American politics. Some of the choice bits:

Why should lily-white podunskville states dotted with villages and hamlets and burgs, and not a single “real” city, wield such wildly disproportionate power to pick the leader of the free world? [Speaking] for us Iowans, we’re a little tired of this, if you don’t mind us saying so. Why should California have so much good weather? Why isn’t Puerto Rico a state? Why is GDP per capita in these United States higher than it is in Guatemala by a factor of 15?

Also splendid is his reply to critics who noted that this situation “represents a deviation from the democratic ideal of ‘one person, one vote.’” Per WW:

Sure, sure. As does a little something we call “the Senate”, and that mysterious but nevertheless incalculably precious institution known as “the electoral college”

Ah, this guy. When I don’t want to scream in frustration, I want to buy him a beer. In this case it’s the latter. I think, anyway; it’s tough to find the precise division amidst his remarks between sincerity and tongue-in-cheek irony, but I’m pretty sure that the main point is an honest opinion.

If it’s just slightly conflicted, well, so is my own; I suppose that if it were up to me I would just have all presidential primaries on one day, like with the actual election, just as if it were up to me I would reform the Senate and the Electoral College and etc., etc., so on so forth ad nauseum.

It isn’t up to me though, so some years back I concluded that hey, here in the real world people (and states) probably can’t be blamed for holding on to what they’ve got, particularly when they have relatively little. I don’t even live in Iowa anymore, but when you have jackasses bemoaning the fact that Cleveland’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame isn’t in New York where it should be along with the induction ceremony and, obviously, everything else in the universe that matters, well… it isn’t that hard to feel a bit skeptical of whining and kvetching from NY and California and Texas, etc.

“Oh, you’re so big on fairness, well hey, what are you guys going to give up in the interest of fairness then eh? You going to sacrifice a few of your surplus major league sports teams? Maybe get Illinois to give American Gothic back to its home state?”

Yeeeeaahhhh I thought so. Well guess what, Iowa and New Hampshire aren’t giving up their every-four-year circus either, and presumably everyone else will have to just put it in their smoke and pipe it.

I’m actually a big believer in fairness, after all, but the whole point of fairness is that there’s give and take; if ain’t no one planning on giving they should probably lose the moral indignation from their plans for taking.