Trudging Through Iowa

By Joe Klein

This is when running for President gets really hard. A bleak, windy Sunday morning in Fort Dodge, Iowa. The local roads are ice. As John Edwards enters the community-college cafeteria, his campaign workers are picking up rows of chairs--to make sure the media don't shoot the empty seats. Edwards trudges through his stump speech--the least engaged I've ever seen him--and specifically asks the sparse gathering for questions about the issues he considers important: health care, global warming, poverty, the economy. There are none such. The questions are odd, off point. A Native American accuses Hillary Clinton of saying something outrageous about Native Americans; Edwards says he doesn't think she could possibly have said that. A child asks if George W. Bush's next job should be on Comedy Central. "I don't think he's very funny," Edwards replies.

The next stop is better, but not much better, and there are several more stops after that. Edwards' passionate, populist stump speech reminds you that his greatest strength as a trial lawyer used to be his closing argument. But this is Iowa, where all closing arguments are being delivered to hung juries. Even the people who support Edwards aren't so sure.

I mention all this not to heap slag or prognostication--the journalistic equivalent of slag--upon the Edwards campaign but to give you a sense of what life is like for nearly every one of the candidates dragging themselves defiantly through Iowa in the final weeks of this campaign. No one knows what's going to happen--and almost everyone appears to be losing ground, slipping on the Iowa ice, with the possible exceptions of Barack Obama and, on the Republican side, Mike Huckabee.

Obama's appearance in Des Moines with Oprah Winfrey was startling, the largest crowd I've ever seen at a precaucus event. The Senator gave a riveting speech--and so did the TV celebrity, who riffed on a line from an old movie about a former slave, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, in which the protagonist would ask young people, "Are you the one?" Winfrey then proclaimed, "I'm here to tell you, he is the one." That was probably too portentous for anything but daytime television. But the freshness of Obama's personality, the easy elegance of his mind--and the fact that his fabulously American racial provenance has become an afterthought for so many winter-pale Iowans--have been the most memorable aspect of this primary season.

It has been an odd campaign for Democrats. The leading candidates are pretty much in agreement on what the big issues are--a new multilateralism overseas, a more comprehensive health-insurance system, the need to address global warming and the hope that the search for new energy sources will create new jobs--and on how to solve them. Edwards gets credit for laying out his dramatic plans first, especially for health care and global warming. Clinton gets credit for the smartest, most detailed plans. Senator Joe Biden gets credit for the unadorned, and short-winded, wit and intelligence of his debate performances.

Given the similarity of their positions and that presidential campaigns inevitably turn on character, it seems likely that this Iowa caucus will be decided personally, viscerally, for reasons that the voters themselves can't always explain. In Algona, Iowa, I spoke with Chris and Martin Peterson, two former Republicans turned off by the Bush Administration, who seemed stumped by their own preferences this year. Chris was thinking about voting for Obama. "I just like him," she said. Her husband Martin was leaning toward Bill Richardson, citing the New Mexico Governor's humorous ads. This may dismay wonks, who want voters to choose the candidate with the best carbon-pollution-auction plan, but it is how elections are usually decided.

Journalists talk about the importance of the "ground game" in Iowa, which is shorthand for an organization's ability to schlep voters to the polls on caucus night. Journalists make scholarly pronouncements about which candidates have the best ground game, but here's a secret: journalists have no idea. In Algona, I spoke to Bill Farnham, a stockbroker, who praised the local Obama organizer, a young man named Nate Hundt, for really ingratiating himself with the community. But Clinton may have the dynamite organizer in Pella; Edwards, in Greenfield. Ground games are unknowable.

In recent days, a slight breeze of sentiment seems to be helping Obama and hurting Clinton. That could shift three times between now and Jan. 3. But neither of them nor any of the other Democrats have anything to be embarrassed about if they lose. It has been a good, substantive, almost civil campaign.