Unemployed? They don't care.
There are a lot of reasons why Iowa shouldn't be the "first in the nation" when it comes to political primaries, and this election cycle certainly isn't an exception. In fact, it's even heightened this year as what is the most critical problem for the nation's crippled economy—high unemployment—has barely broken the political surface there. HuffPo's Arthur Delaney
wrote about this last week.
The first state in the Republican primary contest, Iowa has an unemployment rate of 5.7 percent, compared with 8.6 percent for the rest of the nation. And a recent poll revealed that Iowa Republicans likely to participate in the state's Jan. 3 caucus are less worried about unemployment than the rest of the country is.
Republican presidential candidates have said they support dramatic changes to the unemployment insurance system. Mitt Romney would like to privatize it. Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry want to drug test people who apply for benefits. Candidates frequently talk about the struggling middle class during their time in Iowa, but the candidates haven't said much about why or how they'd carry out their policies, because there's no political pressure for them to provide details. [...]
"Iowa has only 6 percent unemployment. Of all the damn times when Iowa could do us some good, the unemployment picture and making it a bigger issue," Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) said in an interview last week. "But instead ... unemployment is almost a second-tier issue."
That's coming from a Republican! The candidates are allowed to wallow in irrelevancy, on a race to see who can out-crazy the others on hating on poor people, on brown people, and on the evils of the Kenyan Muslim socialist fascist in the White House. Yep, politics in America, 2012. Racing to pander to the most extreme voters in America.