Iowa? The Gatekeeper?

I don't often read Richard Cohen in the Washington Post, but he hit on something today that I liked and have to agree with. In finding fault with the lineup in the Republican Nomination fight, he asked why Iowa? Why has Iowa, 30th in population and so conservative that even someone who thinks women can control whether or not they get pregnant can be leading in the polls for a seat in the U.S. Senate, how does Iowa get to go first? To set the tone for the whole campaign. I mean shouldn't the first state to vote in the primaries be a state that mirrors the country. That is to say is more evenly split between moderate and terribly biased. It just seems to me that Iowa is no more representative of our country than Saudi Arabia is. If you aren't rabidly anti-Democrat, you aren't allowed to be a Republican there. Cohen calls it Gatekeeper. But I don't think Iowa should be a gatekeeper to the town dump. Hey, Rick Santorum won the caucuses there. All this is not to suggest that Iowa is all of the Republican party's problems. To be successful and a Republican, you have to be ultra-orthodox in your far right conservatism. No room for moderate in this Republican party. But maybe a more relaxed state instead of such a fanatical one. But where might you find such a place. All the red states are becoming more and more radical. Maybe a blue state? How about a swing state. But most of them are larger and that would never do. I'm, not sure why, but everyone says it, so it must be true. I suppose the answer would be to pick a state, clear it out and then repopulate it with moderate thinking citizens. Do you think we could do that? Uh huh, me neither. Well what other options do we have? I don't know what other options we have, but I can tell you Iowa isn't the answer to our election process. What we need is a state that elects based on direct voter decisions. Whoever gets the most votes gets to win the whole state. No gerrymandering, just a direct vote. In fact if every state did that, things would be somewhat different. On the other hand, we'd still have ballet shards someplace.