For Iowans, caucuses now an oasis of sanity

By Patrick Healy, Globe Staff, 9/29/2003

IOWA CITY -- Paula Hanson, a Californian visiting her twin daughter soccer players at the University of Iowa, is happy to be far, far away from the Schwarzenegger-Davis-Huffington recall madness back home. Indeed, Iowa suddenly seems a lot less strange than it used to.

"I always thought Iowa was pretty offbeat -- I mean, why do they always get to vote first for the guys running for president?" Hanson said yesterday as she tucked into scrambled eggs at the Hamburg Inn No. 2, a popular stop for presidential candidates. "But everything in politics seems a little off these days. I have to say, the tradition of caucusing here is a little refreshing. I mean, it's normal."

The first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, so often mocked for being an unrepresentative arbiter of national politics, what with Iowa being so small (1 percent of the US population), white (93 percent), and rural (the cornfields never seem to stop), are seeming a lot less weird these days. Since the January 2000 caucuses, the country has seen the Florida presidential recount controversy including the US Supreme Court ruling on Bush v. Gore, the war in Iraq over United Nations protests, and, this fall, the California recall vote on Governor Gray Davis. To many Iowans, the caucuses are no longer an idiosyncracy to feel defensive about.

"The Supreme Court bringing a president into office -- now that's weird," said Carolyn Lieberg, another Hamburg patron, and author of the 1996 book "Calling the Midwest Home." "There are a lot of frightening things going on in this country. I think the caucuses, this winter at least, will provide a way to get together to talk about our worries and fears and hopes, to feel more united."

Iowans have always loved their caucuses, not only for their influence in the presidential selection process, but also for the money and attention they bring to the state. Through the summer and fall every four years, big name politicians rent offices, cars, and hotel space as they sweep through Iowa living rooms and endure aggressive cross-examinations by caucus-goers on their ideas and leadership skills. And then on a cold, often snowy winter's night, Iowans spread out to some 2,100 precinct halls across the state to champion their candidate, crowning Republican and Democratic winners who use the caucus victory to try to generate some momentum going into the first state primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

"It's power, power, power," said Ginny Hick, an administrative assistant who attended a campaign rally for Senator John F. Kerry in Des Moines Saturday. "It defines us. I remember my first rally, for Adlai Stevenson in '56. It seemed like everyone in town was there."

And politicians lavish praise on Iowa as if it offers a one-way ticket to the White House. On Saturday, Kerry described measuring the years of his life "by the height of the corn," and he couldn't seem to find enough superlatives to do justice to Iowa's magnificence. Even Kerry's traveling companion over the weekend, fellow Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who still sees his loss in the 1980 caucuses as the beginning of the end of his presidential ambitions, had voters laughing in Des Moines, Waterloo, and Iowa City as he noted that his wife, Victoria, had insisted on coming along because each of those cities "had some of the best people in the Democratic Party."

Jean Turner, a schoolteacher in Iowa City, said the one-on-one contact between politician and voter is crucial at a time when most politicians, such as those in the California recall, reach voters through television only.

"We get to shake their hands and [do] the weeding out for the rest of the country," she said.

Turner recalled being one of a few, "lonely-feeling" African-Americans in Iowa City when she and her husband moved here in the early 1970s. But while the state is just 2 percent black and 3 percent Hispanic, she said that Iowans of all races exhibited the same fair-minded scrutiny of the candidates.

"Sure, Jesse Jackson may have had a better shot in 1984 if Chicago voted before Iowa City," Turner said. "But he didn't stand a chance anyway. And whites here voted for him, too."

With the caucuses still four months away, the talk of the tables at the Hamburg Inn yesterday was more sports -- the Cubs clinching their first division championship since 1989, the Iowa Hawkeyes fumbling a big game to Michigan State Saturday -- than politics. Indeed, Iowans appear a bit pessimistic about government these days: a Des Moines Register poll published yesterday found that 45 percent feel their state is off on the wrong track, compared with 43 percent who think it's heading in the right direction. The loss of jobs has become a chronic concern.

Said Steve Fugate, manager of the Hamburg: "Two years ago we had more dishwashers with degrees than without. Things haven't gotten much better."

Later this fall Fugate plans to hold a "Coffee Bean Caucus," asking each patron to drop a bean in one of 10 jugs for the 10 Democrats running for president. He hopes it will get more Iowans talking about politics, because, he believes, too many see politics as going haywire.

"After the Bush-Gore fiasco, people felt awfully confused about what the Electoral College actually was -- they thought the popular vote should've counted," Fugate recalled. (Gore, who won the popular vote nationally, won Iowa by a hair in 2000.) "I think that lay the seeds for a more energetic caucus season this year. People want to have a real loud say this year."

Michael Bailey, at the Hamburg on a visit from Oregon, said the California recall had made him more appreciative of the care that Iowans appear to take as they examine presidential aspirants. Bailey, a writer who worked on Robert F. Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1968, still thinks Iowa's role in the nominating process is pretty odd -- "who made Iowa president?" -- but said he doesn't mind that Oregon's primary lacks the same kind of impact.

"Oregonians see Iowa caucuses as town-hall-Abe-Lincoln-old-fashioned kind of democracy," Bailey said. "With all that's going on in the world, maybe that's a good thing."

Patrick Healy can be reached at phealy@globe.com.