The Battle for Iowa

Downstairs, John Edwards is being even more explicit. After whipping the crowd into a frenzy with an impassioned speech blasting the influence of lobbyists and corporate campaign contributors, he turns the gun on his own party. "The presidential candidate who has raised the most money from Washington lobbyists is not a Republican," he says. "The candidate who has raised the most money from insurance companies isn't a Republican. The presidential candidate who has raised the most money from defense contractors isn't a Republican."

He pauses, then smiles. "The answer to all those questions, you probably already know, is Hillary Clinton," he says.

This scene in Monticello takes place exactly fifty days before the January 3rd Iowa caucus, which means we've entered the white-hot weeks of the primary season. In a presidential campaign dominated almost from start to finish by gobs of corporate money, a captive commercial media and reams of computer-generated rhetorical bullshit, the frenzied stretch run in this tiny first caucus is one of the last bastions of real democracy left in the process; it's a state so small and so rife with opportunities for intimate pol-voter communication that even the richest and most powerful front-runner can't cruise to victory on endorsements and name-recognition alone.

Advances in campaign tactics mean that nearly every campaign now has enough reach to score at least one face-to-face with every voter in the state, a fact reflected in the experiences of those attending the events in Monticello. Pisarik, who is still undecided, was led to Michelle Obama's appearance by a volunteer handing out fliers on the street; that chance meeting in turn led to her checking out (and being impressed by) Senator Obama himself when he made a local stop. Molly's mother, who is also in the audience, says she is bombarded daily by phone calls from the rival campaigns — presumably, she says, because she is registered on the party's list of previous caucusgoers. ("It's only my second time," says Molly. "They aren't onto me yet.") Finally, there's Molly's twenty-three-year-old friend Jnee Offerman, who was turned on to several candidates via political outreach groups contacting her on Facebook, now a common method of reaching young voters. "I had people contacting me months ago," says Offerman.

Downstairs at the Edwards event, Harold and Patricia White — an elderly couple who liked Edwards very much, despite taking issue with his "anti-religious language" when he promises to give lobbyists and special interests "hell" — both say they couldn't get away from the campaigns even if they wanted to, because of the sheer quantity of TV ads. "You see 'em ten times a day," grumbles Harold.

At both events, the campaigns ask everyone coming through the door if they're planning to caucus — and if they are, could they please fill out cards with their contact information, so the campaigns can hit them again and again before the all-important vote after the new year. There's simply no place to hide in Iowa at this time of year. Not for voters — and not for front-runners, either.

Saturday, the day before Veterans Day, Des Moines. I'm in the upper deck of the local veteran's hall, a cavernous, convention-center-type complex, trying to keep my head down during the introduction portion of the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, a massive event at which some 9,000 state Democrats turn out to see six of the party's top candidates speak. The setup here is reminiscent of a giant high school pep rally, with each section of the audience turned out in bright uniform colors and placards and screaming like dipshits for their respective candidates. I'm up in the Hillary section, trying to get some video of the politicians entering the hall down on the first floor, when a girl next to me suddenly whacks me on the head with an inflatable Los Angeles Angels-style HILLARY rally-stick.

"What the fuck?" I say, frowning and rubbing my head.

"Sorry," she says curtly. Then she turns back to the floor, where Hill is making her entrance, and starts pounding her silly fan-stick again. The Hillary section starts in with their slogan:

"TURN UP THE HEAT! TURN UP THE HEAT!"

But the chant peters out quickly. "Sucky slogans this year," observes reporter behind me.

"Yeah," his colleague agrees. "Obama's got the only good one."

And sure enough, when Obama himself enters the hall a few minutes later, the whole place vibrates with his two-part chant:

"Fired UP!"

"Ready to GO!"

"Fired UP!"

"Ready to GO!"

Obama's slogan seems just as dumb as Hillary's to me, but I must be wrong, as the "Fired Up!" chant inspires dead silence in the Hillary section, which is suddenly full of long, envious faces. There would be accusatory whispers in the press in the days following that suggested that the Obama campaign trucked in "ringers" from Illinois to this Jefferson-Jackson deal to rig the noise levels at the event, which was widely pronounced a big win for the Illinois senator. Obama's speech — unremarkable in its policy specifics but effective in its open echoing of a Dr. King-esque forensic style — was hailed as the evening's class performance.

Obama is a tough guy to figure. He's a tremendous, magnetic speaker when he is facing a big crowd and has a prepared address in his pocket, but his extemporaneous stumpery in smaller settings is sometimes weirdly nervous and maladroit (in Grundy Center, he recently barked at an elderly town-hall questioner, insisting that he takes terrorism "deadly serious"). His much-hyped decision to take a "forceful stand" against Hillary in recent weeks smacked of the worst kind of hot-air horse-racing bullshit, with the candidate suddenly jumping through hoops to prove to the media that he could exhibit the requisite "aggressiveness" before he'd even decided what issues to "take a stand" about. The overall impression is of a soft-spoken intellectual who's suddenly desperate to show that he's ready to be as full of shit as it takes to win the White House — a psychological state that put Mike Dukakis in a tank, John Kerry in a duck-hunting costume and killed off many a highbrow candidate who blinked in the punishing glare of The Process.

Whatever his shortcomings, Obama is very effective at using his relative freshness as a politician to highlight Hillary's almost Belichickian level of smugness, the reptilian air of inevitability surrounding her candidacy. In Iowa, all of Hillary's weaknesses as a candidate are on display — her short fuse, her instinctive pandering, her fierce desire to control every aspect of her environment, her familial penchant for smoking issues without inhaling them and her reflexive paranoia, doubtless brought on by a lengthy stint serving as the human whipping post of the conservative right. In person, Hillary sometimes comes across as a caricature of the modern career woman who's had to go too far to prove that she's tough enough to hang. Now, with all of her traits thrust under the media glare, the Iowa race has quickly returned to wide-open status; the week before Thanksgiving, polls showed Hillary in a statistical dead heat, with Obama edging into the lead for the first time. Only three months ago, she led Obama by eleven points.