David McElroy

Do you remember me telling you in September that straw polls don’t matter? Many of you insisted in emails to me (and in some comments) that straw polls mean a lot. Let’s revisit that discussion.

In mid-August, Michele Bachmann won the Iowa straw poll with 28 percent of the vote. Here’s the lead of a Fox News story reporting her “important” win: “Rep. Michele Bachmann won the Iowa Straw Poll Saturday, affirming her status as a top-tier candidate in the Republican race to challenge President Obama in 2012.”

That was always sheer fantasy. What happened Tuesday in Iowa is reality.

Bachmann finished the actual caucuses — you know, the vote that matters — with roughly 5 percent of the vote. Her 28 percent showing in a straw poll was shown to be irrelevant.

And what of the winners in Iowa on Tuesday. As I write this, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are still neck and neck for a photo finish, but they’re the clear winners. (Ron Paul was in third place, a respectable finish, but far behind his 27 percent in the straw poll — and far away from the predictions of winning coming from his supporters lately.) The two Iowa winners were also-rans in the August straw poll.

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If you see a guy in a certain kind of blue uniform — with a tie and a badge — he’s obviously a police officer. Right? That’s what we all assume in this country, but if you see a TSA screener wearing a badge, it’s a sham. He’s not a real police power. A new bill in Congress aims to end the sham.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) has proposed that the agency be forced to take away the uniforms that make people assume TSA personnel are police. They’re not. They have no powers to arrest anybody. Blackburn isn’t happy with the TSA’s performance, and she wants to help the public understand that they’re not dealing with actual police when they’re mistreated by TSA staff:

“Congress has sat idly by as the TSA strip searches 85-year-old grandmothers in New York, pats down 3-year-olds in Chattanooga, and checks colostomy bags for explosives in Orlando. Enough is enough! The least we can do is end this impersonation, which is an insult to real cops.”

The badges weren’t added until 2008, and they were a sore point with real cops at the time. I’m not terribly concerned with the feelings of police officers, but I do like making it clear to everyone that the people they’re dealing with aren’t police.

Make ’em wear McDonald’s uniforms or something. Make them feel just as ridiculous and humiliated as they frequently make the public feel. Blackburn’s bill won’t end the security theatre farce that the TSA has become, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Some of my friends think I’m cynical when I say we’re never going to convince the majority to vote for individual freedom. Most people who are steeped in the current left/right divide are honestly confused by what we believe. Let me show you two brief examples from the same newspaper story.

This is an Associated Press article that ran Sunday about Ron Paul in the lead-up to today’s Iowa caucuses. I want to look at two points, one which shows the reporter’s confusion and another which shows a voter’s confusion.

The article is just one of those feature stories with colorful details about a candidate leading up to an election. The sub-text of the piece is that Paul is sort of like a crazy uncle who acts in ways that nobody can predict.

In the fourth paragraph of the story, the reporter refers to Paul as “the mercurial congressman.” When I first saw that adjective, I wondered briefly whether the reporter misunderstands what it means to be mercurial. But then it hit me that he does know what the word means. He simply doesn’t know what Paul means.

To be mercurial is to be “subject to sudden or unpredictable changes of mood or mind,” according to my dictionary. Those of us who admire Paul realize that he’s anything but that. It’s his principled consistency that makes us admire him. But for those who spend all of their time with other politicians — those who see the Republican and Democratic versions of Big Government as opposites — his views are truly confusing.

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