POLITICS 88 : ‘Kingmaker’ of Iowa Caucuses : Grandmother Wooed by All but Picks Simon

Betty Strong, a 62-year-old woman with a pixie smile, loves to brew strong coffee and regale guests in her modest home with tales of her grandchildren.

She is a full-time homemaker who has never held public office. Yet she is an Iowa caucus kingmaker, a political force who has been courted by almost every Democratic presidential candidate for more than a year.

Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt slept at her house. Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr. stopped by for coffee. Former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt, Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Illinois Sen. Paul Simon have all made the pilgrimage to Sioux City to meet with her.

Doubts Own Importance

“I don’t know why they all make such a big deal over me,” Strong insists. “I don’t think I’m important.”

That’s not what national Democratic political operatives say.

“She is the closest thing to an old-style political boss in the Iowa caucuses,” said Mike McCurry, Babbitt’s press secretary. “She can get people to the caucuses.”

“She runs an organization that is the closest thing to a party machine in the whole state,” added Joe Trippi, Gephardt’s deputy national campaign manager.

Earlier, she supported Biden. As a result, “Joe Biden had a tremendous organization here within a few weeks of entering the race,” said Earle Grueskin, a former Sioux City mayor who is now a county supervisor. “I’d hate to run against an organization run by her.”

An Edge for Simon

Later, after Biden dropped out of the race, Strong was wooed by all of the candidates and eventually chose Simon. Now, most political observers in Iowa believe Simon has an edge in the state’s Sixth Congressional District, which includes Sioux City.

“A lot of people are here with us because they knew Betty Strong thought a lot of Paul Simon,” said Ernie Dannenberger, a Simon field representative in Sioux City.

Yet her influence doesn’t flow from anything tangible. Although she was once the party’s county chairwoman and is now on the party’s local central committee, she has never held any governmental post and has no control over local patronage jobs.

Instead, hers is a power unique to the Iowa caucuses, a process that puts a premium on lifetime friendships and personal contact with a small group of likely voters.

Because only about 100,000 voters are expected to attend the Democratic caucuses on Monday, any campaign that can recruit 30,000 to 35,000 supporters statewide could win in this year’s crowded race. In Sioux City, where perhaps only about 5,000 Democrats will vote, any campaign that turns out 2,000 supporters will be able to carry the town and surrounding Woodbury County.

So Strong’s vast network of activist friends, her intimate knowledge of the town’s political landscape and her long record of hard work for the party and for local candidates make her a force to be reckoned with.

Sways Votes

“There are a lot of people in town who say I’m going to vote the way Betty Strong votes,” said John O’Brien, manager of Simon’s Sioux City office.

Indeed, old friends like Helen Delaney and Helen Reilly now drop by to stuff envelopes and make phone calls for Simon even though they do not really support him.

“They have been working with me for 20 years, they don’t have to like who I like to come down and help,” Strong said.

Strong’s stature is enhanced by the fact that she never limits her campaign work to the presidential election. Even this year, she has a crushing schedule of volunteer duties for campaigns ranging from county sheriff to the local congressional seat.

“After all these national people leave, we’ve got to get down to the really important job of electing Democrats here in Sioux City,” she said.

Born in Texas

In fact, Strong’s first love is local campaigning. She was born and reared in Texas, moved here to her husband’s hometown in 1952 and quickly took an interest in local affairs. Her first campaign was in support of a bond issue for the construction of a juvenile detention center.

But her influence flows also from the fact that she understands the complexities of the caucus system better than anyone in town, knows which local campaign workers can be trusted to work hard and which ones can’t and has memorized voting patterns in the city down to the precinct level.

On one recent day in the Simon office, she was rattling off the ZIP codes of each precinct in town from memory for volunteers addressing envelopes. She can do the same with home phone numbers of key supporters.

She acts as a consultant and trouble shooter for the campaign, helping Simon’s staff members from out of town avoid making serious gaffes and saving them time and unnecessary effort.

Winning Track Record

Strong is also attractive to campaigns because she has a winning track record in the caucuses. In 1976, she supported Birch Bayh for president; Woodbury County was one of only two counties he carried that year in Iowa. In 1980, she lost with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, but, in 1984, she turned out the vote for Walter F. Mondale.

That background has given her enough prestige to stand up to national campaign staff members when she feels they are riding roughshod over local Democratic interests.

In 1984, for instance, she kicked Mondale’s paid staff out of Sioux City and told the campaign’s Des Moines office not to send anyone else to town. As a result, she and Mondale’s other local supporters ran an independent field office financed by the national Mondale campaign--and carried Woodbury County.

“She’s tough, she’s one of the hardest hard-ball players I’ve ever gone up against,” said Gephardt’s Trippi, who was Mondale’s Iowa coordinator in 1984.

But, despite her stature here, Strong says she has no interest in ever running for office herself. Like many political junkies, she loves campaigns, not government.

“A lot of Democratic leaders have tried to get me to run for City Council, supervisor or the state Legislature, but I’m not interested,” she says.

“I just like the organization part, I like the strategy sessions, and then seeing if you can really do it.”