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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
The candidates have blitzed through towns and cornfields and spent millions on ads. But in the final hours before Monday night's caucus, Democrats here remain stubbornly undecided.
Jan 19, 2004 | John Kerry had already addressed two big gatherings of undecided voters earlier that day in Clinton and Davenport, two cities in eastern Iowa. But it was only when his campaign bus rolled into Des Moines, where most of the national press has stationed itself in the final days before Monday night's caucuses, that the scene began to resemble a circus.
On the sidewalk outside a small community center, where Kerry was to receive the endorsement of a local African-American leader and have a surprise reunion with a Vietnam veteran whose life he saved, dozens of reporters and camera crews were waiting for the bus, while dozens more of their colleagues headed inside to secure a spot to watch the proceedings. Tim Russert talked to Al Hunt, and Tom Brokaw strolled up to join the crowd.
Standing in the bus aisle as reporters and aides gathered their things, Kerry smiled. "Uh-oh," he said. "You know who's here? All the BSDs."
In this Iowa contest, the BSDs -- big swinging dicks -- have gone from calling the caucuses a contest between Howard Dean and Richard Gephardt, because of their strength in public polls and their strong organizational support, to a four-way dead heat. Suddenly, Kerry -- who is shown leading in Sunday's poll by the Des Moines Register -- and John Edwards have become the compelling stories of the moment.
But Iowans have stubbornly refused to conform to the media's expectations, and they haven't been much more cooperative with the mind-bogglingly expensive ad wars the campaigns have been waging. Despite the four well-funded candidates' record-breaking expenditures, it's still sometimes easier to find undecided Iowa voters than any other kind at the increasingly jampacked campaign events.
With a significant chunk of likely caucus-goers still unpersuaded despite all the hype surrounding the campaign, it seems that two things will determine who the winner is: the campaigns' ability to organize their declared supporters, and the candidates' personal attempts to sell themselves to the many voters still making up their minds. In other words, Iowans are making their decisions based upon the strikingly simple concept of hearing out each of the Democratic candidates and -- ready? -- supporting the one who makes the best case that he should be president.
"The bottom line is that there's a law of diminishing returns with the media and with the bigfoot political operations," said Jonathan Rosen, a Dean operative who works on ground organization. "All this money was being spent by all of the campaigns in Iowa on robo-calls, mail, surrogates and ads. The media focuses on that, because it's a much easier story to write than what's happening on the ground. The lesson to be learned is that people are more sophisticated in a state this small, and with this much exposure to the candidates, than any of that stuff gives them credit for."
It is, of course, impossible to know exactly what the effect has been of the commercials, or of the high-profile endorsements each candidate has hoped to leverage into popularity among Iowans. Dean, for example, left Iowa two days before the caucuses to be with former President Jimmy Carter. He then returned to Iowa yesterday and was joined by a "surprise guest," his wife, Judy Steinberg Dean, who'd flown in from Vermont to make a brief campaign appearance with her husband - her first such appearance since last summer.
"I wanted to come here today, I wanted to say thank you to the people of Iowa who have been so kind and gracious to my husband," she said. The crowd cheered her as if she were a rock star.
At a Kerry event tonight at the Iowa Fairgrounds, he took the stage with, among others, U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, former presidential candidate Gary Hart, and E-Street Band drummer Max Weinberg, helping him attract an overflow crowd of around 2,000. Gephardt, whose most important endorsements in Iowa were probably from the heads of the unions that provide most of his strength, went in a slightly different direction by producing singer Michael Bolton to sing at one of his events.
The star power of high-profile supporters may help to attract crowds and media to events. But the key to growing support beyond each candidate's core adherents is in-person campaiging, where Iowa voters seek -- demand, really -- answers to their questions before agreeing to throw their support to any one candidate. That's been best exemplified by the once-moribund Kerry campaign, which has made great strides in the polls through countless baby steps out on the campaign trail.
He gave what has become a typical performance at the Radisson Quad City Plaza in Davenport, where a crowd of several hundred Iowans had waited for him for an hour before his "Real Deal Express" finally pulled up. After introductions from a local pastor, and then by his wife, Theresa Heinz Kerry, who has been touring the state on his behalf, Kerry gave his stump speech, studded with such ovation-inducing crowd pleasers as, "I came here to Davenport to mark the beginning of the end of the Bush presidency!"
Then he started taking questions, announcing upfront that he would stay until every undecided voter had had his or her questions answered satisfactorily. And the voters had questions. One asked about federal testing in public schools. Another asked about aid money to AIDS-ravaged African nations. After the better part of an hour, Kerry sensed it was time to begin wrapping up, and asked if anyone in the crowd had any questions that, if left unanswered, would preclude their supporting him at the caucuses.
Hands shot up all over the room. One woman, the wife of a disabled veteran, blurted out tearfully that she couldn't possibly let him leave without an explanation of what she could do to help her husband who, she said, was getting completely inadequate care from the Veterans Administration.
He answered that it was a "huge" issue for him, and vowed to do more than the Bush administration has for cash-strapped veterans and their families. "The first measure of patriotism is keeping faith with those who wore the uniform," he assured her, "and I will do that, OK?"
A question followed about stem cell research, followed by one about judicial appointments. After another half-hour, Kerry's agitated staff huddled with the reporters in his entourage to announce that they would be blowing off the next event -- a candidate forum in Dubuque that was to start in 20 minutes, but was 90 minutes' drive distant.
