CAMPAIGN JOURNAL
OUT OF IOWA
by Philip Gourevitch
New Yorker
On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, Teresa Heinz Kerry told a rally of more than a thousand Democrats at the state fairgrounds in Des Moines that she “felt very at home” in Iowa. “It’s almost like where I grew up,” she said, which was startling, because her husband, the senator and Presidential candidate John Kerry, had just told the crowd that she grew up in Mozambique. Like many Americans, she is a naturalized citizen, and in her childhood knew America only “as an ideal,” Kerry said. She “never saw her father vote till he was seventy-one years old, because they lived in a dictatorship.”
The Senator was losing his voice. He resorted frequently to a water bottle, but his throat refused to produce anything more than a ragged stage whisper. Still, he sounded positively stentorian in comparison with his wife. Although she held the mike close, her words, tinged with a lilting Portuguese accent, never rose above a breathy murmur. The audience fell silent and listened as if eavesdropping on a private soliloquy.
Heinz Kerry, who inherited a vast fortune from her first husband, John Heinz, the ketchup heir and a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, is known for the surprising turns of her unscripted public pronouncements. She can be nearly as unbuttoned in her speech as Kerry is buttoned up in his, with the result that she is sometimes impolitic and always worth listening to. Now she pursued her unlikely comparison of Iowa and Africa, finding that the Hawkeye state measured up well against the mother continent. There was “the earthiness” of the Iowans, and there was the “sparse, very clean, very beautiful” landscape, and there were the little farming towns with their churches, just like the settlements known as “dorps” in southern Africa. She liked the word “dorps”; it seemed to make Iowa more real to her.
Never mind that Iowa’s population is ninety-four per cent white and that the place is harrowingly cold in January. Teresa Heinz Kerry had a larger point to make. She had spent a lot of time in Iowa, stumping for her husband, and, despite the comforting sense of familiarity, she said, “I was shy in the beginning.” She hadn’t been able to articulate why she was resistant to politicking until John Norris, Kerry’s campaign manager in Iowa, who helped organize post-communist elections in Macedonia, told her that the biggest challenge there had been getting newly democratized politicians to come out and ask people to support them. “I realized that deep inside here I am still afraid of a turnaround in the political system where you get punished or you lose your job or get sent to jail,” she said. “Even though I’m not afraid to stand up myself, I was shy about asking people to vote.”
The candidate’s wife had come to praise Iowa, but her initial unease with the Democratic nominating system there was well founded. After all, Iowans don’t actually vote in January. They caucus, and caucuses cannot be said to meet the fundamental standards by which elections are judged free and fair elsewhere in the country, or throughout the world. Iowans must gather at a fixed time on caucus day—six-thirty in the evening—in an open room, where they express their political preference publicly. If a candidate receives the nod from fewer than fifteen per cent of those present, the people who supported him engage in a political version of musical chairs, crossing the room to choose another candidate, or declaring themselves undecided, or just leaving.
Gordon Fischer, Iowa’s Democratic Party chairman, has likened the caucus procedure to a session of “sixth-grade gym.” But why put down sixth graders? The caucuses are directly at odds with the principles of one person, one vote and the secret ballot, which are—our electoral college notwithstanding—held sacrosanct in almost every democracy on earth. Not surprisingly, voter participation in caucuses is consistently low. Dan Herndon, a retired Methodist minister who was attending a rally for John Edwards in Waterloo, Iowa, said that his son was working an evening job and his wife was out of town. “So essentially both of them are disenfranchised,” Herndon said, adding, “The elderly, people who have trouble going out at night, and people who don’t like to talk in groups or be part of groups are also disenfranchised. It’s not the ideal system.”
If an election in a Third World country—let’s say, Mozambique—were conducted like an Iowa caucus, it might well be condemned by international monitors as a gross human-rights violation. As it happened, on the same day that Iowans went to stand for their candidates in town halls, churches, fire stations, and, yes, sixth-grade gyms, a hundred thousand Iraqis took their stand in the streets of Baghdad, protesting the Bush Administration’s attempt to impose a caucus-driven electoral system on them. They wanted one Iraqi, one vote.
Iowans claim, in defense of their peculiar, and disproportionately influential, ritual for picking presidential candidates, that their habit of producing surprising outcomes proves the system’s freeness and fairness. The public, disputatious nature of the caucuses is celebrated as evidence of civic vitality and the glory of an open society. This year, Democrats who considered Howard Dean a liability to the Party’s hope of reclaiming the White House are inclined to agree. They are talking about what happened in Iowa as a flowering of political sanity. Perhaps the caucus system ain’t so bad, they say. But it’s not the system that deserves credit. If you like and trust Iowans’ political judgment, why not afford them the opportunities other Americans enjoy? Next time around, give them the vote. |
