The Battle for Iowa

The trouble for Hillary actually started in early October, at a campaign stop in New Hampton, Iowa. Clinton teed off on an audience member named Randall Rolph, who asked her a pointed question about her vote to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. "The premise of the question is wrong," Clinton snapped. "Somebody obviously sent it to you." Rolph angrily objected to the implication that he was a plant, leading to a poisonous exchange.

Things got worse. During a Democratic debate at Drexel University in Philadelphia on October 30th, Clinton — who is nothing if not scrupulously prepared and on-message in debates — fumbled a question about a New York proposal to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. Hillary appeared to support the plan, then backtracked after Chris Dodd blasted it — opening the door for Edwards to rip her one. "Unless I missed something," Edwards cooed, "Senator Clinton said two different things in the course of about two minutes." From that point forward all of her rivals, as well as a predictable assortment of media assassins, began pounding the flip-flop theme. The sudden wave of negative attention seemed to throw Hillary off her game. First she reportedly forgot to tip a waitress named Anita Esterday at a Maid-Rite diner in Toledo, Iowa. Then her campaign made matters worse when it went back and left $20, inspiring yet another run of ugly headlines.

And it didn't stop there. A few weeks later, after Hillary outlined a renewable-energy plan during a town-hall event in Newton, Iowa, she called on a Grinnell College student named Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff, who asked a question about global warming. Gallo-Chasanoff later told her campus newspaper she'd been asked by the Clinton campaign to lob the softball. Not long afterward, a minister named Geoff Mitchell revealed that the Clinton campaign had asked him to pose a question at a different event about how Hillary would be tough on Bush about funding the war.

By then a full-blown controversy over the planted questions was raging, and Hillary seemed to be stepping in shit every time she went outside. On November 11th — ironically in Waterloo, Iowa — Hillary experienced the kind of unscripted fuck-up that can derail a campaign in the media age, getting entangled with four American flags, Chevy Chase-style, as she tried to leave the stage following a Veterans Day campaign stop. "I think that the bases are not weighted," Hillary screeched as she frantically tried to right the toppling flags.

All of these on-the-trail mishaps were accentuated by some starkly unattractive strategic moves emanating from her campaign headquarters — including the much-decried decision to play the female-victimhood card after being ganged up on at the Philly debate. Even worse, at the Las Vegas debate on November 15th, Hillary took a page directly out of the Karl Rove with-us-or-agin-us playbook, accusing her rivals of resorting to Swift Boat-style tactics in their criticisms of her. In the world of Democratic rhetoric, that's akin to calling peace marchers a bunch of warmongering baby killers.

"Hillary had a really, really bad couple of weeks," says Joe Trippi, the famed campaign Svengali now lurking behind Edwards. "It gave everybody a chance to get back in the campaign."

I run into Trippi in Monticello, where he's easy to spot; if there's a guy who looks like he borrowed his clothes from a sleeping vagrant standing behind a fist-shaking populist, it's probably Joe Trippi. But even without actually seeing Trippi at an Edwards event, one might have deduced his presence. The campaign of John Kerry's former yes-man running mate has been transformed into a "Give 'em hell" insurgency — rhetorically, at least, a strong echo of the last presidential horse Trippi rode in this derby, Howard Dean.

On the campaign trail in 2004, Edwards struck me as a hardworking pretty boy hack, a working-class kid who'd chosen to make an inoffensive career for himself waving pompoms and carrying water for the team. He reminded me of a teenage townie caddy grateful for a summer internship in the big-city firm of the country-club president. But the 2008 version of Edwards looks like a completely different animal. Spurned by a Clinton-dominated party apparatus that has emptied its treasure chest for Hillary, Edwards has reinvented himself as a whistle-blower candidate, railing against the corruption in his own party. His stump speech sounds almost desperate in its ambitious earnestness, a balls-out broadside against a party establishment that left him behind.

"I have seen the seamy underbelly of what happens in Washington every day," he says in Monticello. "If you're Exxon Mobil and you want to influence what's happening with the government, you go and hire one of these big lobbying firms. This is what you find. About half the lobbyists are Republicans. And about half of the lobbyists are Democrats. If the Republicans are in power, the Republican lobbyists take the lead. They're lobbying the Congress, they're passing the money around. If the Democrats are in power, the Democratic lobbyists take the lead.

"Here's the point," he adds. "They're pushing the same agenda for the same companies. There is no difference."

When Edwards is done making his point, he hurriedly reaches for a copy of that day's Des Moines Register to wave an example — a front-page story about drug companies lobbying the Democrat-controlled Congress to stall legislation that would have prevented brand-name firms from delaying production of cheaper drugs. It is just the latest example of the pharmaceutical industry buying off the Democrats who, when Edwards was the running mate four years ago, were all too happy to let Bristol-Myers Squibb hire the Boston Pops to play a Ted Kennedy tribute at the Kerry convention while drug legislation they opposed was on the table.