I’m on record as saying that I think the Iowa caucuses are a dumb way to begin picking a president. Primary states, with their secret ballots and reliance on more than organization, are preferable. But if we have to have Iowa caucuses, they should all be as exciting as this year’s contest. Howard Dean, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry and John Edwards each have some momentum going into the final weekend. Each has brought his stump speech up several notches. They are all bunched together in a political mosh pit with no clue who will be hoisted above the crowd and given a ride to the bigger stage. It’s also possible that only a few thousand (or fewer) votes will separate them and we’ll be back essentially where we started a year and a half ago, with a bunch of candidates still in the hunt.
The issue differences between these four Democrats are not as significant as some would have you believe. They basically boil down to whether to roll back all or only most of the president’s tax cuts. One candidate loathes President Bush; another merely dislikes him. One candidate adores labor; another merely loves it. The rest is squabbling over the usual flip-flops and misrepresentations of the past. As for the war, they all agree on the fundamentals–that Bush misled us into Iraq, but we have to stay. They differ only on who said what about the war when. This is hardly the stuff of historic party splits.
But somebody’s got to win, and here are a few things that could make a difference: The cell phone factor. Polls in caucus states are notoriously unreliable; they can’t measure the intensity of the get-out-the-vote organizations, which are especially important because going to a caucus requires a two-hour commitment of time, instead of 10 minutes to vote conventionally. This year’s added wrinkle is that many younger voters still live with their parents, but no longer share their parents’ telephones. They have cell phones that are unlisted and thus not included in polls. These voters are considered to be disproportionately for Dean, so he may be stronger than he looks.
The brotherhood factor. As one Gephardt labor organizer put it to me, “Who are you going to follow to a caucus–a [labor union] brother you know from work or some kid with piercings from Seattle?” By this theory, the decisive figure in Iowa is that a total of 95,000 workers belong to unions that have endorsed Gephardt, which dwarfs the size of Dean’s unions. At one old-fashioned rally I attended, complete with 18-wheelers pulling up dramatically to the door, labor seemed fired up for old friend Dick. Indeed, Gephardt-supporting unions have been calling 20,000 potential caucus goers a night. That by itself could determine the outcome.
The corn-fed sophisticate factor. Des Moines has Starbucks and everyone has the Internet. Iowans are anxious to show that many of the old stereotypes of country bumpkins are laughably out of date if there ever was any truth to them in the first place. (Marshalltown’s schools, for instance, are more than 30 percent Hispanic). But caucuses remain largely the province of the comfortable. If you have kids, you need to be able to afford a baby sitter. One way for many Iowans to show they are sophisticated is to support Kerry, who is getting a big share of Yuppie support here. And, of course, he already has a corner on the veterans.
The self-esteem factor. A Johnston woman, a dietician, whom I met at an Edwards event gave me a clue to his surging support. “He fits my personality,” she told me. What she meant was that she, too, is a positive person who doesn’t like to run down others. Even if people act human and sometimes say unkind things about other people, they prefer to think of themselves as above petty bickering. Edwards validates that. He’s making the high road his unique selling proposition, and it’s working.
None of this offers a clue to the outcome. But it’s helping to make the 2004 campaign look a helluva lot more interesting than it did just a few weeks ago.
