Politics 88 : Remember Iowa, the Toast of Politics? The Party’s Over

Remember Iowa?

Remember the herds of cameras and gaggles of reporters, the incongruous images of pinstriped politicians traipsing through the muck and manure of cornfields and barnyards?

Remember the marathon debates, the earnest-sounding speeches, the reams of stories, the polls, the pundits?

Remember the months of poking and prodding and stroking and analyzing the mysterious prairie psyche of the typical Iowan as if he were some kind of corn-fed laboratory rat?

Remember the endless profiles of what was declared a bellwether state: “the feisty folks who have an outsized say in picking the next President,” as Time magazine proclaimed on its Jan. 25 cover?

Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea journo-politica culpa.

A scant two months ago, Iowans were the toast of politics as they held first-in-the-country precinct caucuses and crowned Democrat Richard A. Gephardt and Republican Bob Dole as their presidential favorites. Then, faster than you can say Harold Stassen, voters in the East and South consigned the Gephardt and Dole candidacies to the electoral junk heap.

‘Didn’t Mean a Lot’

“Evidently Iowa didn’t mean a lot in this caucus deal, did it?” observed a bemused Harold Knowler, a grain and livestock farmer who voted Democratic in his hometown of Delta. “We just didn’t determine very much.”

No, Iowa did not. Even the No. 2 picks in the state quickly bombed out. Remember Democrat Paul Simon? How about Republican Pat Robertson? Vice President George Bush, who has all but locked up the GOP nomination, finished a dismal third in the Iowa voting. Among the surviving Democratic contenders, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis finished third, the Rev. Jesse Jackson fifth and Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr. turned his back on Iowa to concentrate on the South.

The plunge from kingmaker to goat has left prominent Iowans scrambling to explain just how things got so out of whack and fretting over how to preserve the future mystique of a campaign event that gives their small state of 3 million people outsized attention and national political clout.

“It kind of flopped,” said Rob Davis, a news executive who coordinated political coverage for KCCI, Des Moines’ local CBS television affiliate. “ . . . Party activists are concerned about it, but as far as Joe Six Pack, I don’t think he gave a damn during the caucuses and I don’t think he gives a damn now.”

Assessment May Be Harsh

Such an assessment may be a bit harsh, but both Iowa Democrats and Republicans admit they have a vested interest in keeping a high profile spot for their state on the presidential campaign calendar. The caucuses bring in tens of millions of dollars of spending to Iowa, raise large amounts of money for the local party machinery and give Iowans considerably more sway in national party affairs than they otherwise would have with the scant number of convention delegates each party actually selects here.

That could explain a somewhat rosy rationalization among party leaders for what outsiders may see as a repudiation of Iowa’s claim to influence. The rapid collapse of the Iowa choices in 1988 will actually strengthen the role of the caucuses in 1992, suggested Bonnie J. Campbell, the chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party: “The biggest criticism of Iowa’s role was that the campaign began and ended here,” Campbell explained. “You can’t lay that rap on Iowa this time.”

To be sure, anyone in the country who had picked up a newspaper or flicked on a television last winter might have been excused for presuming that Iowa was the be-all and end-all of the nominating process. Back then, there were still 13 major candidates in the race and most of them spent most of their time in Iowa, seemingly shaking every hand, kissing every baby and milking every udder in sight.

Nearly 3,000 press credentials were distributed by local party officials to cover the caucuses, triple the number handed out in 1984. And long before the campaigning got hot and heavy, several news organizations--including The Times--had spent thousands upon thousands of dollars to set up Iowa bureaus.

“I’ve never seen anything like the media and candidates tripping over each other for months,” chuckled Drake University political scientist Hugh Winebrenner, a longtime student of the caucus process. “It’s a media event. It takes on a life of its own and grows beyond anything that’s rational. . . . There were stories written that didn’t have much to do with anything. It’s just that there was so much time and effort put into it, they had to do something.”

Winebrenner personally logged nearly 100 media interviews in just the last week of the campaign. And he clearly was not alone in sensing the press had gone amok. A recent restaurant review in the Des Moines Register began by telling local diners that it was safe to eat out again now that the national press corps had left town.

Even staunch defenders of the caucus process admit things got out of hand. Phil Roeder, a spokesman for the state Democratic Party, said his favorite moment came the weekend before the caucuses when Hollywood heartthrob Richard Gere, candidate Dukakis and about 20 camera crews and 65 to 70 reporters showed up in a quiet Des Moines neighborhood for some door-to-door campaigning. “In essence, it was a parade that went down this Des Moines street,” Roeder recalled. “It was such an incredible mob scene that they never made it to one person’s doorstep.”

Satellite Technology

The media explosion was fueled in part by the proliferation of candidates as well as developments in satellite technology that encouraged local television stations to bypass network coverage and file their own reports. But the principal reason for the crush of press in Iowa is simply because it was there.

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s going to determine anything,” said Register Editor James P. Gannon. “It’s the only game in town. It’s the start. And the political writers and the television reporters are not going to miss the first inning of the game whether or not it’s going to have any impact on the outcome of the thing. And what candidate’s going to skip it?”

Actually, a couple of candidates did skip Iowa this time around and the fear here is that, given the turn of events following the caucuses, even more will skip it next time.

“I think that people are going to conclude that Iowa is not so important,” predicted George Wittgraf, a lawyer who chaired Bush’s campaign effort here. “ . . . Rather than leading the country, somebody’s going to be nominated and elected in spite of Iowa, not because of Iowa.”

Steve Roberts, Wittgraf’s Iowa counterpart in the Dole camp, agreed that future candidates may deemphasize Iowa as they strive to follow the Bush and Dukakis formulas of crafting more national campaigns. Still, Roberts, like most other political leaders, said it was important for Iowa to cling to its first-in-the nation status.

One More State

“We would just be one more state in the process and perhaps not a terribly significant state,” Roberts said of suggestions that national party officials might try to force Iowa back into the caucus and primary pack. “. . . It’s probably the clearest chance that agriculture and agriculture-related industries and the heartland have to send a message to Washington and to the national leadership about what the needs and the problems are of this part of the country.”

Furthermore, caucus champions argued, the lengthy Iowa campaign has considerable value on a national scale even if the winners here turned out to be losers elsewhere. Not only did Iowa help winnow out some of the weaker contenders like Democrat Bruce Babbitt and Republican Pierre S. (Pete) du Pont IV, but it also provided a low-cost media market and a confined area which all the candidates could take advantage of to hone their campaign skills and platforms.

“It’s a good place to go to limber up and try a few pitches and take a few swings and see if you can make the team,” said Gannon. “And then the game goes on and the decisive innings are later. But there is a need for spring training. That’s all Iowa ought to be seen as. Not Armageddon, but spring training.”