Democrats court Iowa, row by row

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware sent her a handwritten note: “I want you to know I’m coming after you.” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York snagged a seat beside her at the Democratic Party’s blockbuster Hall of Fame dinner. After a speech this spring, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois pulled her aside. “Jean,” he said, laying a hand on each of her shoulders. “I really want you to join my campaign.”

On the receiving end of this star treatment was not some big-ticket donor, Washington strategist or Hollywood celebrity. The men and woman who would be president were in pursuit of a soft-spoken retiree who likes to crochet and who had spent most of her life teaching English to junior high school students.

Jean Pardee, 61, is a dogged, self-made political player, whose years of volunteerism have elevated her to Democratic Party chairwoman of Clinton County and the 1st Congressional District and member of the party’s State Central Committee.

Every four years in this state of 3 million, old-school activists like Pardee spring to the center of the political universe. These stalwarts may go unrecognized outside their home precincts, but presidential contenders bank on them to deliver support in a state where politics is intensely personal.

“The fact is, in Clinton County, they have been listening to Jean Pardee for years. Not just since the Democratic picnic last week but since Dukakis rolled through in 1988, and before,” said Mike Malaise, the political director who helped Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry win the caucuses in 2004. “Caucus-goers in Iowa are used to listening to these local people.”

The caucuses, currently scheduled for Jan. 14, remain the first major test of the contenders, despite the crowd of other states pushing their contests up the calendar to increase their clout in the presidential nomination races. (The Iowa straw poll of Republican candidates, an early benchmark in the race, will be Saturday.)

The state’s enduring influence is seen in the many days -- 291 as of Aug. 1 -- that the top dozen candidates have visited this year. New Hampshire, long the kickoff primary state, falls a fairly distant second. The top candidates had spent only about half that amount of time -- 156 days -- in the Granite State as of Tuesday.

The Internet age may have spawned YouTube debates and e-mail fundraising, but Democrats and Republicans recognize that in Iowa, you must show up in person to win.

The political becomes extremely personal in a state where voters don’t simply cast a ballot: Caucus-goers convene on a winter night to declare their preferences in front of friends and neighbors. A commitment must sometimes be sustained through hours of debate and entreaties to jump to other candidates.

Pardee cannot order others how to vote, but the campaigns recognize her and other “influentials” as crucial in bringing others into the fold.

Said Biden: “By the time this happens, if I am on my game, there will be 5,000 people here who I will be able to remember by name. You will have a personal relationship with them.” Biden is returning here to campaign 20 years after his first run for president.

In the 2004 campaign, Kerry became so familiar with one pair of activist siblings that he came to call them “Carol and Cammie, my Clinton County sisters.” The McGuires that year also sponsored then-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina -- a candidate then and now, who became Kerry’s running mate in 2004 -- at their home in this Mississippi River community.

The sisters are well on their way to meeting all of this year’s candidates. Campaign staffs recognize the two women as tireless volunteers who will work phones or walk precincts from morning until night.

Cammie, 44, a financial analyst for a medical center, and Carol, 46, a public school reading specialist, have a knack for getting face time with the presidential contenders, even in a crowded room. Carol hobnobbed with Clinton before the Hall of Fame dinner in Cedar Rapids in June, using the encounter to attempt to lure the candidate to a fundraiser for Clinton County’s state representative, Polly Bukta.

“I said, ‘Sen. Clinton, please consider coming to Polly Bukta’s corn boil this August.’ And I held out a note, a reminder for her. I called her ‘Hillary,’ ” Carol McGuire recalled, chuckling at her chutzpah. “And she says, ‘Oh, a corn boil. I love sweet corn. Oh, here, Carol, put that note right in here. Put it right in my pocket.’ Oh, she was so warm and gracious about it.”

Whether because of McGuire’s charms or the irresistibility of candidate Clinton appearing in a town called Clinton, the senator’s staff has told Bukta that the Aug. 18 picnic is on the calendar. That gives Bukta a big draw for her annual fundraiser.

Just south in Scott County, Susan Frembgen receives similar attention from the candidates. Frembgen is doubly attractive as both the county Democratic chairwoman and an officer with the local chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees.

In the race for the 2004 nomination, presidential candidate Howard Dean and Kerry worked fervently to land Frembgen, an information technology specialist at the Rock Island Arsenal, a local military installation that employs more than 6,000. Kerry won out, in part because he responded to Frembgen’s request that he visit the arsenal, which had been threatened with downsizing.

“He got it. He understood that in this community, the arsenal is a very important thing,” Frembgen said. Dean’s staff bemoaned the loss of Frembgen late in 2003 as another sign that the former Vermont governor’s chance of winning Iowa was slipping away.

Jean Pardee merits special attention because of her singular focus and longtime devotion to the Democratic Party. She recalls coming home from school one day and asking her mother, a teacher, and her father, a welder who repaired farm equipment, about the kids who were wearing “I Like Ike” buttons. “No, we do not like Ike,” her parents instructed her.

Pardee first caucused in 1968, choosing Eugene McCarthy over Robert F. Kennedy because McCarthy was first to come out in opposition to the Vietnam War. By the 1976 caucus, she had established herself as enough of a player that an obscure former governor, Jimmy Carter, phoned from Georgia to ask for her support.

Pardee taught for more than three decades in this city of 27,000 that once billed itself as the “sawmill capital of the nation.” Gone are the lumber barons and the huge log rafts that floated down the Mississippi from Wisconsin and Minnesota for processing. Major employers today include a medical center, a corn processing plant and a factory that makes shrink-wrap for food products.

She now spends long hours here in the modest Democratic Party headquarters. The roar from the neighboring motorcycle repair shop sometimes challenges the pols who come to speak.

Associates say Pardee is practically married to the party, a description that seemed apt last month as she presided over Democratic stalwarts from 12 counties at a workshop on how to run a caucus. The crowd of about 200 cheered as, one by one, Biden, Edwards, Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe and Obama took turns heaping praise on Pardee.

Obama capped the day by bringing the Clinton County chairwoman birthday flowers. Among all the committee members and local politicians, Pardee “is the main one I want to acknowledge,” he said.

Pardee later would smile and concede “there was a certain charm” to all the recognition. But she quickly added that she remained “seriously torn” among at least four candidates, whom she declined to identify.

Such reticence is not unusual among parties’ county chairpeople, particularly early in the campaign season. Because of their role in helping organize the caucuses -- which are run by the Democrats and Republicans, not by the state of Iowa -- the county bosses want to avoid the appearance of tilting the sessions in favor of one candidate.

Some activists withhold their endorsements as long as possible for another reason, said Richard Machacek, a farmer and Democratic State Central Committee member from northeastern Iowa. “They just love the attention,” Machacek said. “And they know that once they commit, they might not see [the candidate] again. They move on.”

The war in Iraq looms large for voters here, as in the rest of the country. Educators like Carol McGuire focus on the No Child Left Behind Act, hoping the education measure can be scrapped once Bush is out of office. Frembgen would still like to hear candidates offer reassurances about the future of the Rock Island Arsenal.

But the way the candidates and their campaigns conduct themselves also counts for a lot.

Pardee still recalls how Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator and former basketball star, responded to her comment about his autobiography with a “flippant” remark in the 2000 race. “I was county chairman then too and I thought, ‘This is remarkably stupid of you,’ ” she said. She backed Vice President Al Gore.

Dean, in contrast, won her over in 2003 by arriving more than 15 minutes early for a meeting. He answered questions directly, she said: “honest, clear answers, not a flowery circle.”

This summer, Pardee told Edwards’ state co-chair that the campaign had failed to follow through on promises to deliver the candidate. “I said, ‘There is this strange problem of not being able to get Edwards to Clinton County.’ The number of delegates that we have here is not piddly, compared to some of the places they were going,” Pardee recalled. Two weeks later, on their sixth and final stop of a long Saturday of campaigning, John and Elizabeth Edwards went to Ashford University, in Clinton.

Others might be bowled over by such attention, but Iowans have come to expect it. Pardee concedes she is “somewhat surprised” that Edwards and Clinton have not made direct appeals for her support. But she does not seem to doubt that the entreaties are coming.

Pardee recalled a tale about the legendary House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill (D-Mass.) and his first run for public office, a narrow loss. On election day, a neighbor told O’Neill she would vote for him, even though he had failed to make a direct appeal. O’Neill reminded Elizabeth O’Brien he had known her for years. He had shoveled her snow. “I want you to know something,” O’Brien told O’Neill, in a lesson he would never forget. “People like to be asked.”

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james.rainey@latimes.com