By Herb Strentz

If Iowa is to keep the first-in-the-nation caucuses, the state GOP is going to have to do a better job than the caucus-reform recommendations now on the table. There is little to convince the national GOP that Iowa has its act together.

What happened in the caucuses this year was clumsy and scary. News coverage of the events made the press look deservedly ridiculous, too.

Iowa efforts to straighten things out may be well-intended but are likely to just provoke more head-shaking.

Last week the Iowa GOP caucuses emerged from the Hawkeye equivalent of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab with a bolt tightened here and there but with loose screws still unattended to.

After the fiasco of the 2012 caucuses, the Iowa Republican party created a committee to see what should be done to redeem the caucuses in the eyes of its national party and the press in an effort to salvage the caucus come January 2016.

The repairs were required because the Iowa folks reported Jan. 4 that Mitt Romney won the Republican caucus by eight votes over Rick Santorum and then two weeks later reported that Santorum was the winner by 34 votes.

(Some five months later, at the state Republican convention on June 16, the delegates selected for the party’s national convention were stacked in favor of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul — a result of political maneuvering and not another caucus recount.)

Ignored in the reform recommendations were the two really loose screws in the whole shebang.

1. The Ames Straw Poll.

2. The closed nature of the GOP caucus, thanks to how the religious right dominates the Iowa Republican Party.

The Ames Straw Poll kicks off the caucus press coverage in the August preceding the caucuses. Candidates for the party’s presidential nomination pay about $35 a vote and other fees in the thousands of dollars with the money going to the Iowa GOP. The national press gets all excited about this — the vote totals, not the money — and turns the sow’s ear into a silk purse. The winner of the 2011 Ames Straw Poll was U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann who celebrated her victory by being the biggest loser in the caucuses and then briefly opting for dual citizenship in Switzerland, perhaps figuring she’d be more appreciated there.

But the Straw Poll nonsense was not on the agenda of the Iowa GOP when it came to reforming the caucus.

Neither was the restrictive, evangelical nature of the GOP caucuses, which tells moderate candidates they need not apply.

The reform committee could have advanced a recommendation along these lines: “Given Iowa’s role as a bellwether for the selection of our party’s candidate, it is important that the Iowa caucus be open to the widest spectrum of candidates to encourage turnout at the caucuses and to foster debate over the widest range of Republican concerns.”

Instead, the committee advanced eight recommendations that tinker with how caucus volunteers are trained and how results are reported. For example, there would be a 72-hour delay in certifying a winner in a close race, such as that between Romney and Santorum. (The closest previous race was when George Bush beat Ronald Reagan by 2 percent in the 1980 caucuses.)

The recommendations will not be acted upon for months, or maybe for a few years, because the 2016 caucuses are still 40 some months away.

Small wonder Iowans fret, as Des Moines Register columnist Kathie Obradovich wrote “If Iowa forfeits its first-in-the-nation status because the nation has lost confidence in the process, it won’t matter how fast the votes are counted.”

Given the nature of the Ames Straw Poll and the domination of the religious right in Iowa, it is a wonder there was any confidence in the first place.

Perhaps it could be worse: Suppose the national GOP decides everything is just fine in Iowa and the evangelical right is the hope of the future for the Republican Party. There’s selective evidence for that outcome. And some folks in Iowa would be delighted that we were first-in-the-nation with that message, too. CV

Herb Strentz is a retired administrator and professor in the Drake School of Journalism and Mass Communication and writes occasional columns for Cityview.