Shocking news, isn’t it, that the Iowa caucuses aren’t charming, intimate neighborhood gatherings where everyday citizens winnow the field of presidential candidates over coffee and strudel? The always-astute national media, and David Yepsen, alerted us to this appalling turn of events after Sen. Barack Obama drew rock-star, national-convention-worthy crowds in Ames, Cedar Rapids and Waterloo, and Sen. Hillary Clinton brought traffic to a near standstill while her entourage moved about the city. No wonder things have been so quiet over at the Eat-N-Greet Café and Community Center.

We Iowans like to pretend that we shape politics as we break bread together, and some of us will even open our homes to television cameras for that bit of playacting. But the caucuses are as scripted and rehearsed as a community theater production. Like community theater, there is occasionally some room for improvisation and spontaneity, but the game plan is always the same: attract the party leaders, preferably the ones with deep pockets, and address as many potential caucus goers as possible at one time.

John Cox, a guy from Illinois who keeps leaving voice mail messages to the effect that he is the only true conservative candidate in the race, might like the coffee club circuit of yore. But this is a guy who would have trouble filling Hilton Coliseum even if he sold tickets to a Clinton-Obama debate. I’m not sure he counts.

Speaking of that, what is it about the caucuses that appeals to people who couldn’t lead a Boy Scout troop out of a municipal park, let alone lead the country? There was a guy who used to stalk the newspaper I worked for several years ago – and occasionally, (yikes!) my apartment – and seek my counsel about whether he should run.

Seriously, he always asked, “Beth, should I run?” I put as literal a spin on these questions as possible to avoid any actual discussion of politics, because the more we talked about politics, the stranger the conversation became. Really strange. Paranormal strange.

“Well, it depends,” I’d say. “Are your shoes in good shape?”

We’d end up talking about footwear. Pretty safe territory, barring the occasional controversy over saddle shoes vs. wingtips.

I think it’s OK that the neighborhood caucuses have gone the way of George McGovern – which is to say, faded away. We want the world to think of Iowa as a state populated by smart, literate and politically discerning people, not backwoods folk who’ll use the same toothpicks they used to dig corn out of their teeth to cast a vote in a straw poll.

That’s not us.

There’s some more good news.

The upside to factory hog farming is that no one who seriously expects to win the caucuses will volunteer to have his or her picture taken with an Iowa pig now that we’re raising them in crates. Laugh if you want, but I had special “caucus (any similarity to the slang ca-ca is purely coincidental) shoes” when I worked for the mainstream press. I carried them in the trunk of my car, and Dick Gephardt went on and on and on about how clever that was of me. This guy is from Missouri and he didn’t understand that the barnyard is the last stop before the shoe graveyard?

And there’s some not-so-good news for the television advertising departments, restaurants, hotels, bars and other businesses that depend on the caucuses to deliver Iowa a shot of economic vitality.

If we’ve strayed so far from the idea of neighborhood gatherings to winnow the presidential field and are now packing crowds into big venues, has Iowa lost its advantage?