An Iowa swing -- without breaking a sweat

It takes a special kind of courage, or foolishness, to eat a sloppy sandwich in front of a dozen TV cameras and a mob of reporters.

But with poise and a squirt of ketchup on her fries, Hillary Rodham Clinton seated herself on a red vinyl stool at the Maid-Rite diner and bit into the loose-beef concoction. Yum, she said.

Her waitress, it turned out (and yes, it was an unscripted stop), was a single mother, Anita Esterday, 46, who has worked two and three jobs at a time to support herself and her two sons. For the next 24 hours, Esterday played a prominent part in Clinton’s speeches as the Democratic presidential candidate trundled across Iowa in a big blue bus, offering a paean to working-class Americans.

Clinton told a crowd in nearby Marshalltown that President Bush ignored their voices but “I hear the story of the woman at the Maid-Rite.” If elected president, Clinton promised an audience in Ames, she will think of people like Esterday every time she steps into the Oval Office.

Clinton campaigning is a study in focus and Swiss-watch precision. Her 30 years on the trail is evident as she polishes off the $2.59 diner special without a drip on her gold pantsuit, then weaves the lunch encounter into the larger narrative of her candidacy.

During a sweep last week across Iowa -- 10 stops in 3 1/2 days -- campaign events started and ended close to schedule. The backdrops -- rolling fields, a city square and banners that read “Rebuilding the road to the middle class” -- were picture-perfect. She touched on her major points like a runner rounding the bases: Bush is bad. Vice President Dick Cheney is worse. Hard-working Americans deserve a secure retirement and reliable, affordable healthcare. The “era of cowboy diplomacy” must end. So too must the war in Iraq.

There was much alliteration. On Bush and the war: miscalculation, misjudgment, mistake. On his handling of Hurricane Katrina: indifferent, insensitive, incompetent. And her goals as president: Restore America’s world leadership, rebuild the economy, reform government, reclaim the future.

Clinton speaks in a crisp and orderly fashion, as if presenting a term paper. She frequently accents her points by stabbing an index finger in the air. Her voice alternates between a shout -- which is how she shows passion -- and a sorrowful tone when, for instance, she lamented the president’s veto of a bipartisan children’s health bill.

“Let’s veto George Bush and his policies!” the New York senator hollered at the crowd in Marshalltown.

She never seems to perspire, not even inside the swine barn at the Johnson County fairground, where 2,000 Democrats fanned themselves and her presidential rival John Edwards emerged with hair dripping and his collar drenched. Clinton, the last of five Democratic hopefuls to speak at the barbecue, never shed her black pinstripe jacket.

At this stage of the 2008 primary race, with the first voting still more than two months away, Clinton is running a textbook front-runner’s campaign. During her Iowa swing, her media entourage -- including reporters from as far away as Germany and Japan -- had no opportunity to ask serious questions. She directed all her salvos at Bush, speaking kindly of her Democratic rivals the one time she mentioned them. “We have such great candidates running,” Clinton told a crowd at the Gigglin’ Goat restaurant in Boone. “This is the kind of election you don’t have to be against anybody.”

Voters managed to get in a few questions, but not many. Things briefly turned ugly in New Hampton, when a man challenged Clinton’s Senate vote last month declaring Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group -- a point that former Sen. Edwards (D-N.C.) has hammered, calling the resolution a possible prelude to war with Iran. Clinton bristled, challenged the premise of the question and suggested the man who asked it was working for a rival campaign. She later apologized.

Such spontaneous moments were all the more striking for their rarity. One came in Webster City, after Clinton delivered a speech unveiling her retirement savings plan. A woman in the audience noted Clinton’s shoes were untied and expressed concern the candidate might fall. A grinning Clinton dropped to one knee and laced the tan moccasins -- “so comfortable” and purchased, she said, at a museum gift shop in nearby Fort Dodge. The crowd applauded.

The campaign is so methodical, the candidate so calibrated, there was immediate suspicion that her lunch stop in tiny Toledo was planned and that Esterday, who just started waitressing that day, had been a plant. But the owner, Brad Crawford, said there had been no advance notice of Clinton’s visit. Crawford is a Republican, his wife an independent and neither, he said, has decided whom to back for president. “But it’s not Clinton,” he said.

The crowds she drew during her Iowa visit typically numbered in the hundreds and were older and less demonstrative than those that turn out for her chief rival, the more dynamic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. Clinton arrived and departed to standing ovations, but people rarely rose from their seats as she spoke. Her words seldom took flight. Instead they chugged along, bearing a heavy freight of statistics: 47 million people in the United States lacking health insurance, a child dropping out of school every 29 seconds, college costs rising 40% under Bush, a national debt topping $9 trillion.

The electricity came after Clinton had finished speaking, when crowds packed against the metal barricades and velvet rope lines set up for security. She often spent as much time, or more, shaking hands, posing for pictures and signing autographs as she did delivering her remarks.

Clinton is the first woman to make a strong run for president, a fact that is somewhat lost in all the recent talk of her supposed inevitability. But audiences were reminded of the historic nature of her campaign each time she was introduced, usually by a state lawmaker who offered some recitation of the barriers she has broken: the first presidential spouse to hold a post-graduate degree, the first to take an active policy role in the White House, the first woman to win a U.S. Senate seat in New York.

In a stock phrase, Clinton said she was “not running because I’m a woman. I’m running because I think I’m the best-qualified and -experienced person to hit the ground running in January 2009.” Still, she ended her remarks by saying how thrilling it was to meet elderly women who never thought they would live to see a female president, and little girls who take for granted that they will.

As if on cue, a 99-year-old woman came forward to shake Clinton’s hand as she worked the rope line in Dakota City, amid the antique farm equipment and big red barns outside the Humboldt County Historical Museum. Then came 10-year-old Katrine Cadman, who brought a political picture book for Clinton to sign.

“This is historical,” said Cadman’s mother, Pixie Jensen, 57, who drove three hours round-trip to hear Clinton speak. “My daughter doesn’t think it’s unusual to see a female onstage at the debates instead of just a bunch of white males. I just think that’s wonderful.”

Clinton beamed as she spotted a group of young women nearby. “OK, all the Fort Dodge girls,” she said, unhitching the velvet rope and waving 10 of them through for a group photo. “Excellent! Excellent!”

But Clinton was never far off task. Over and over she called out to the people pressing up to greet her, “Have you signed a support card yet?”

mark.barabak@latimes.com