The Battle for Iowa

Watching Edwards raise the curtain on this stuff now, I am struck by how he can't fucking wait to show the crowd the newspaper story. He has the same look on his face I once saw on Dennis Kucinich — another lower-class kid who made it to Washington — when Kucinich was scrambling to show me the ugly details in the fine print of NAFTA. By the time Edwards finishes his presentation — in which he promises unequivocally to bring all combat troops home from Iraq within a year — he has the crowd standing and cheering.

Watching this, I can't help but think that this electoral phenomenon had been willed into being by the overreaching arrogance of the Clinton campaign. Hillary's machine plays the power game so flawlessly that it leaves the casual observer with the unmistakable impression that, just as it rigs the questions in town halls, it wants to leave nothing about the election to chance. You see the candidate trotting back and forth across Iowa with former governor Tom Vilsack in her pocket (and, most likely, the vice presidency dangled in front of his lumpy forehead), dragging with her a giant mercenary army of support staff (in recent weeks the Hillary campaign hired 100 new workers in an effort to visit 50,000 homes in Iowa by Christmas) as she spends mountains of money from her vast war chest ($360,000 for advertising in one week alone).

And when Hillary errs, as she has done many times in recent weeks, she tends to err on the side of burning the ordinary schmuck and sticking to the inside play. You don't see too many Fortune 500 CEOs complaining that Hillary stiffed them on a tip; no, that only happens to some Iowa diner waitress, at the same time the lavishly funded Hillary is out on the trail trying to explain her support of the Wall Street crowd's sweetheart Peru Free Trade Agreement (to Midwest audiences that already know all they need to know about the NAFTA her husband passed). This is the significance of all the stumbling and audience-rigging and Rove-ing of debate opponents and carping at the Randall Rolphs of the world that we saw in recent weeks; they have exposed Hillary as a New York Yankees-style villain who buys all the best players but seems to resent having to actually win it between the lines.

That palpable anger at being disrespected as an opponent seems to be what's driving the Obama and Edwards candidacies, which have both scored points of late by hammering Hillary as a control-obsessed insider (Obama assailed Hillary's refusal to release records from her time as first lady; Edwards ripped her in the Vegas debate for rigging the town-hall questions). While Obama is essentially attacking from the center, criticizing her not for being a part of a corrupt system but for simply being a flawed candidate, the anger displayed by Edwards appears to have an ideological component that threatens to bring the Ned Lamont-Joe Lieberman dynamic into the Iowa race; his candidacy opens the door for the caucus to be a referendum not just on Hillary, but on the corporate-dominated agenda of the Democratic Party.

When Clinton backers told the New York Times recently that Hillary is moving from "primary mode" to "general election mode," it was not only an infuriatingly premature declaration of victory, but a surprisingly candid admission that their candidate has two faces. What's happening now is that Hillary is taking punches in both of those faces, with Obama punching her general-election face and Edwards hitting her in her primary face. Not a good place to be, with less than fifty days to the vote.

Even without all the punching, it's a bit premature for Hillary to be taking Iowa for granted. Given the curious procedural rules of the state's caucus, even third-string candidates like Joe Biden and Bill Richardson can wind up swinging the race. The way this deal works is that on caucus night, meetings are held in each of the state's ninety-nine counties to divide all the caucusgoers into groups supporting this or that candidate. If any candidate group scores less than fifteen percent in any given precinct, members of that group can move to a viable group, or move to a nonviable group to make it viable, or just walk away and not be counted.

In a dead heat like the current race, that means a fringe candidate could virtually dictate the outcome by swinging his groups to one of the three leaders. Biden, whose new swept-back white-haired look almost completely obscures his plugs on the trail, has managed to go many months in a row without insulting Indians or Negroes or otherwise jamming his foot in his mouth, an amazing show of restraint that might win him the job of secretary of state. Dodd, the Connecticut senator who has one-upped the field by actually moving with his family to Iowa, has made serious gains here, winning the support of the firefighters union, whose organizational strength was a key factor for Kerry the last time around. Bill Richardson's goofy-ass yukster TV ads (showing him sitting with a long face before an indifferent job interviewer unimpressed with his long résumé) are among the most overplayed in the state, and although his massive emphasis on Iowa has not thrust him into contention, he is still running at about eleven percent in the polls. Even Dennis Kucinich, selling a message very similar to Edwards, is retaining a small but insoluble percentage of the vote.

That's a real problem for Hillary, whose base in Iowa may be thinner than it looks. More than sixty percent of Hillary's supporters here say they have never participated in the state's caucuses. That, strategists say, suggests that many of the party's more reliable, rank-and-file caucusgoers have thrown their support to other candidates. When January 3rd rolls around, many of Hillary's "name recognition only" voters may be at home, while the Athenian zealots pack the halls with their own lists of hand-picked, not party-picked, choices. All of which means that there are a lot of votes still in play in the first vote of the primary season. Somebody is in line for a third-place death blow — and for the first time since this race began, it's not a given that it won't be Hillary.

"Whoever comes in third," Trippi tells me, "will be in for a world of. . . ." His voice trails off. "If Hillary comes in third after spending all that money," he finally concludes, "how does she explain that?"

[From Issue 1041 — December 13, 2007]