The Many Chasing The Few
Elusive Caucus-Goers Tracked by Campaigns
By David Maraniss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 17, 2004; Page A01
Second in a series of occasional articles
DUBUQUE, Iowa -- The trouble with the home addresses in Mike Koziara's campaign packet was that they were all off by a few digits. The computer printout said Charlie Martin, a retired Teamsters truck driver, lived at 8628 Elmwood Drive, but the rural addresses in Dubuque County were changed a few years ago, so now his ranch house was at 8656 Elmwood. At last they found Martin, and he answered the door, and even said he intended to vote for their man, Dick Gephardt, out of loyalty to the union cause, though he wasn't sure where his precinct caucus was being held.
Koziara marked Charlie down as a Y-1 -- Yes for Gephardt -- while his labor team partner for the afternoon, Gregory Raftery, eased his Dodge Durango with Tennessee plates down the driveway and on toward the next address. As the Jan. 19 Iowa showdown approached close and fast, Koziara, a railway union member from LaCrosse, Wis., and Raftery, a Laborers International organizer out of Nashville, seemed determined to leave no door unknocked in the search for the elusive Democratic caucus-goer, even in the most remote outposts of their assigned territory.
This year, while the Iowa caucuses are provoking more national political excitement than they have in decades, a reverse variation of the old Churchillian saying nonetheless holds true across the Hawkeye state, including Dubuque, which has become a key battleground in eastern Iowa: Rarely have so many worked so hard to persuade so few.
About 57,686 people live in this city along the Mississippi and its rural environs, an intensely political region full of grass-roots activists who have a sophisticated understanding of the caucus process. But according to lists compiled by campaign organizers, only 3,957 citizens have been identified as likely to attend the Democratic caucuses at Dubuque County's 48 precincts Monday night. The projected totals range from 291 caucus-goers at the Blessed Virgin Mary order's Roberta Kuhn Center in the upper-middle class neighborhood of southwest Dubuque to perhaps 16 showing up at Worthington Memorial Hall out in the farmlands.
With polls showing four contenders bunched closely and with more volunteers are arriving by the hour to bolster their candidates, the ratio of political volunteers to probable voters has almost reached parity in some Dubuque precincts, and the search to find possible first-time caucus-goers has become all-consuming.
Raftery and Koziara, two of more than four dozen out-of-state labor organizers who have descended on Dubuque to canvass union households for Gephardt, were rumbling across the highway and over a ridge in search of Bill Decker, another union truck driver. Their map was as imprecise as the address list. Every rolling vista looked the same: the chilled mid-January tableau drained of color; frozen cornfields of faded yellow and deep brown; silos, windmills, random splotches of dirt-encrusted snow.
Twenty minutes and many U-turns later, they found the Decker house. Koziara hopped out with a plastic bagful of cookie bones, just in case. No angry mutts, but no Decker, either. Another long hunt for Charles Wood's place on Bennetville Road. Strangers were friendly and accommodating in Dubuque, Raftery noticed. They'd open the side door and give him directions. Wood was at work. At the next stop, an elderly woman answered the side door and said the former railway man they were looking for was her father, but he was not going to the caucuses because "he doesn't get out much anymore."
On to Loras Bellmann's house at 10815 Idaho Street. Bingo. He was home. He had never attended a caucus in all his 79 years, but now he was retired from Concrete Products and ready to go. He knew the time (6:30 p.m. Monday) and place (Table Mound Elementary School). His wife, Lou -- "they call us the Double L's," he said -- will be going with him. They are for Gephardt, but also like John Kerry if Gephardt doesn't make it.
Deciding Impressions
The Double L's had been interested in Howard Dean, Bellmann confided, until they saw television replays of the time the former Vermont governor snapped at a man from Waverly who had asked him to behave neighborly toward everyone, including President Bush. That bit of videotape had left a deeper impression on him than the endless stream of campaign ads that aired on his television set while he was watching "Jeopardy" that afternoon, Bellmann said.
Two more Y-1's, and Koziara and Raftery headed back downtown to the Dubuque Five Flags Holiday Inn, their home away from home. The winter sun had set by the time they got back to the hotel's Iowa Room, the makeshift headquarters for the visiting Gephardt union men. Three hours on the road in a hunt that bagged or reaffirmed three possible votes.
If many Dubuquers seem fully willing to avoid the caucuses, it is nearly impossible for them to avoid the campaign at large. There are local forums on how to attend a caucus. Every television channel, from ESPN2 to daytime soaps, has been flooded with campaign ads, and the candidates are visible as well. Kerry, who survived with strong grass-roots support in Dubuque when he was foundering elsewhere, returned to Clarke College on Friday afternoon with a possible comeback victory in sight; John Edwards, also on the rise, is due down at the riverfront Saturday, along with Dennis Kucinich; Gephardt is coming Sunday for what his supporters hope is not a last stand.
Even grade-schoolers are part of the political drama. Table Mound Elementary held a mock Democratic National Convention on Thursday. Sixth-graders made the case for all the candidates and tried to persuade the younger grades. Christie Vilsack, the first lady of Iowa, delivered the keynote address and put in a word for her favorite candidate, Kerry, though Dean seemed to be holding strong with second-graders. Each class represented a different state: the Wisconsin delegation came marching in wearing cheeseheads, the Iowa delegates with cardboard ears of corn sticking out of their heads.
The caucus invasion is overwhelming, as oversized as the 24-wheeler from Chicago's Teamsters Joint Council 25 that is beached like a giant blue whale on Main Street. So many scores of volunteers are walking the neighborhoods or working telephones that a concern of canvassers is not so much that they won't reach the people but rather that they will reach them too often and anger them. |
