If there are 250,000 people who turn out tomorrow the campaigns will have spent an estimated $200 per voter, according to the New York Post. With last-minute ad buys and perhaps optimistic turnout estimates, the cost per voter could go even higher.

Reporting from an Iowa appearance by Bill Richardson, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank writes that if turnout of real-life Iowans is too much lower than in the past, “might be outnumbered by the thousands of journalists, campaign staffers and volunteers” flooding the state.

"It's all grass roots here in Iowa," said the New Mexico governor, wearing galoshes and cotton chinos. "It's not big media, big technology."

Cut!

Actually, Governor, it is big media and big technology. The event was put together by CNN. The supporters in the crowd were mostly from out of state, sent here by the campaigns at the cable network's invitation to serve as a backdrop for the live shots.

Milbank says that these days “all Iowa’s a stage, and all its men and women merely players.” He watched CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux play her part and say to Sen. Joseph Biden as the TV screen filled with a picture of waving Biden signs:

"You've got a lot of supporters," Malveaux said.

Actually, he had about 10 supporters there, and they were from Boston, New York and other distant points. John McCain also had supporters in the bar -- from New Jersey and Delaware -- and Richardson had about three dozen, mostly from New Mexico.

Where were the Iowans? "I don't think they appreciate it enough," said Alex McVeagh, a McCain volunteer at the bar who came from Tennessee.

Thank God the media and the campaigns are there in full force to help Iowans understand the important role they play in the dramadey the caucuses are.

While most of the media has done little but play up the importance of the event, there have been a few MSM attempts to put the caucuses into context. The Post’s Howard Kurtz says the media “treats the winners as superstars and the also-rans as lamentable losers.”

Without that massive media boost, prevailing in Iowa would be seen for what it is: an important first victory that amounts to scoring a run in the top of the first inning.

That does seem more reasonable, doesn't it? Part of the problem is that while the media may inflate the importance, the very structure of the caucuses are flawed. In November, the Post's Dan Balz sat through a caucus briefing and did his best to explain the arcane rules. He also makes clear some of the important differences between the caucuses and a primary that make the former less than inclusive.

In a primary, voters quietly fill out their ballots and leave. In the caucuses, they are required to come and stay for several hours, and there are no secret ballots. In the presence of friends, neighbors and occasionally strangers, Iowa Democrats vote with their feet, by raising their hands and moving to different parts of the room to signify their support for one candidate or another.

Caucuses are designed to suppress turnout, says Jeff Greenfield at Slate.

At the same time, Iowa's vaunted precinct caucuses -- especially those of the Democratic Party -- violate some of the most elemental values of a vibrant and open political process. As far as a mechanism for selecting a president is concerned, you might end up with Iowa's model if you set out to design a system that discouraged participation and violated basic democratic values.

What the Democrats discard, Greenfield writes this morning, are “at least two key elements of an open, fair system: the secret ballot and the one-person-one-vote principle.”

(It’s worth noting that in Washington State Republicans also have a more democratic process. The GOP will select half its delegates from a primary election and half from a caucus. Democrats will only use the caucus results and ignore what happens in the Feb. 19 primary.)

Who’s to blame for what Christopher Hitchens calls the open corruption and “flagrantly anti-democratic character” of the Iowa caucuses? Hitchens says it is “tripe coverage that is provided by a mass media that (never forget) is the direct beneficiary of the huge outlays of money the candidates make … .”

The Stranger’s Eli Sanders -- whose paper is rarely a beneficiary of such cash outlays -- is in Iowa this week. Today he’s traveling with John Edwards an all-night bus tour. He’s got photos up and some a behind-the-scene look at what it means to be a boy on the bus in 2008.

It’s morning in America, wherever in America I am, and it’s time to get back on the bus.