THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 21, 1995 TAG: 9508210032
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 56 lines
Politics is essentially a comedy if you can lay aside the fact that the jokers are playing with our very lives.
Just consider what the Iowa Republican Party had the gall to do Saturday. In a classless venture, it charged voters $25 a head to take part in a straw poll for next year's presidential primary.
That super poll tax to raise dough for the party's coffers set a world's record. It will go into Guinness, sure as gun's iron.
Not even Virginia's Harry Byrd the elder would have dreamed in his most avaricious moment of levying on Virginians a poll tax of more than $1.50 to vote.
That in the straw poll Phil Gramm and Bob Dole tied at 2,582 votes each lent a touch of the ludicrous to the scheme.
It was even funnier when Gramm crowed immediately that he had won because he tied Dole.
That Gramm, after hustling voters from other states to come to Iowa by car, planes, buses, boats, gliders, and trains to vote, managed to wind up in a tie with Dole was a kind of cosmic sendup as if arranged by the gods on Olympus to ridicule the mortals.
It reminds you of the hectic cross-country race of a dozen comedians by every known conveyance in the movie ``It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.''
Gramm was capering around, braying victory, like a jackass who has found in the grass a clutch of partridge eggs.
Unlike the legitimate primary, which will be confined to Iowa's voters in February, Saturday's crass straw poll was a money-making scam open to anybody anywhere in the United States who cared to journey to Iowa in a mid-August heat wave.
The straw poll, which drew more than 10,000 participants, made about $250,000 for the GOP, and it also made a mockery of February's primary.
That primary draws a horde of media gypsies from around the world. They range back and forth, chasing this candidate and that, while throwing around money that bolsters Iowa's economy.
Iowa would be in a frenzy if another state had established a competitive primary. Yet Iowa's leaders allow the state GOP, driven by greed, to set up a meaningless preface to the real thing.
In a sense, hog-hungry politicians are manipulating Iowa's political process. So Iowa itself was the big loser in the straw poll.
The winner was Pat Buchanan, who drew 1,922 votes for a solid third place without apparently having to lay out any plane fare or lodging or buy any meals.
Buchanan didn't spend any money because he didn't have any to spend, preferring to wait and invest it in the primary. by CNB