Since diversity is the lifeblood of any functioning democracy, I should be saddened that our options for the presidency are being limited so soon, but lets face it, Dodd and Biden really didn’t bring anything new to the table. These two senators have experience up the yin yang, but their messages never differed enough from the so-called “front-runners” in this fixed race. Dodd is Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee that regulates the financial and banking industries, and raised about one-fourth of his funds from them. Biden is Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and tried to win votes by explaining that almost everything his populist anti-war rivals wanted to do was unrealistic. Though definitely admirable contenders, they weren’t exactly a break from the status quo.

As you well know by now, Obama won the Iowa caucuses with 38%, Edwards came in second with 30%, and the “inevitable” Hillary Clinton followed close behind with 29%. So what do these results say about the American people? Not a damn thing. First of all, it’s Iowa. Secondly, the caucuses are an entirely undemocratic process where “the media is a co-conspirator in the con“. And third, um… it’s still fucking Iowa!

Even with the homogeneous demographics of Iowa being as far away as they are from the major concentrations of Democratic voters nationally, these results truly say more about the handful of special interests who shaped this scheme than Iowans themselves. Any “journalist” who tries to squeeze any more meaning out of these results is selling you something. And therein lies the role of the Iowa caucuses, to act as fodder for media propaganda. The power of the caucus doesn’t lie in its ability to predict, but to convince. The corporate media will use these results to convince us that these are our opinions. We will be told that we actually do want Obama as president, and that these results are undeniable evidence that we support the exclusion of Kucinich and Gravel from ABC’s debates. In reality, these are the results of a screwy process controlled by a handful of influential white people. If other Democratic presidential candidates were as honest as Kucinich and Gravel have been about Iowa, they’d rail against this tyranny within the Democratic Party rather than play into such a detrimental lie.

So even though I’m not entirely saddened to see Dodd and Biden go, I am sad that they left specifically because of this sham. Their decisions to bow out now only give credence to the idea that Iowa matters. We can only hope that their supporters are more enlightened than they are to ignore this soap opera and flock to Kucinich, Gravel, or even Richardson.