PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES FATE DETERMINED IN IOWA - Explain that to other countries (Barf Alert)

Not even three million people live in the U.S. state of Iowa. But on Jan. 3, voters there will determine the fate of those seeking to become America’s next president. The battle has begun in earnest.

The United States is a country that likes to explain democracy to other nations. It is also a country that starts wars to bring democracy to the world. It allows the candidates for its highest office, the presidency, to spend a year and a half campaigning, leaving no stone unturned as it delves into their past. Its political mood is gauged on a daily basis by anywhere from 10 to 20 opinion polls.

There are smart thinkers at every medium-sized newspaper in America and astute analysts at every television station and in the campaign offices of each candidate who aspires to be the country’s next president. It is a highly intellectual debate that has developed over the fast few months, usually fast-paced, often bold and full of risks at every turn.

Iowa - a flat state of corn, cows and the occasional small town. Iowa, a sparsely populated state in the U.S. Midwest, is home to 2,982,000 people, 94 percent of them white.

Astonishing things have been happening in Iowa in recent weeks: Hillary Clinton knocking on the doors of hog farmers and smiling timidly; Rudy Giuliani helping an elderly woman cross the street; Mitt Romney telling a joke; Barack Obama standing in the lobby of a Des Moines hotel whistling a tune; Fred Thompson looking awake.

The American presidential election campaign is heating up. Although the general election isn’t until November 2008, Iowa residents of both major political parties will be the first, on Jan. 3, to cast their votes to determine which Democrat and which Republican will make the final run for the White House. Voters in New Hampshire, South Carolina and the rest of the 50 states will follow suit in the days and months ahead.

It could snow on Jan. 3, a Thursday. And there will be football on TV - both could reduce voter turnout. No more than 100,000 votes are up for grabs for each party in Iowa, and only 3,000 to 4,000 votes will decide whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, the two leading Democratic candidates, will win the state’s important first-in-the-nation primary election. Winning in Iowa is a traditionally a tremendous boost for a candidate. Conversely, candidates who fail to place a strong second or third in the state are often finished.

Iowa’s version of the pre-election primaries is called the Iowa Caucuses. The word “caucus” means, literally, “meeting of voters.” Instead of voting directly for a presidential candidate, voters in the state’s 1,784 election districts will be picking statewide delegates, who in turn will convene several times after that to select the state’s delegates to the parties’ national conventions in the summer, when delegates from all 50 states will nominate the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. This proportionate system means that the candidate who wins Iowa isn’t necessarily the one who captures the most votes - or delegates. What America’s democracy lacks in fairness it makes up for in complexity.

The current hot-button issues in this election campaign are not Iraq and Iran, but the economic crisis, China’s growing strength, health insurance and domestic security. The Democratic contenders are competing over qualities like character and leadership, while the Republicans have taken their fight to a more personal level.

Americans in this presidential campaign are asking themselves questions like: Who believes in the right God? Who pardoned fewer murderers while serving as a young governor? Who would be toughest on immigration?

Of course, it is by no means certain that the Democrats will still be ahead when the general election rolls around in just under a year. But it looks that way for the moment, at least, partly because current President George W. Bush is so unpopular and partly because American voters are confronted with an unusually weak collection of candidates for the Republican nomination.

Take Mitt Romney, for example, a Mormon who served as governor of Massachusetts, then worked as a corporate consultant and now portrays himself as a right-wing avenger. But the one impression anyone listening to him speak is left with - at a recent appearance in Urbandale, for example - is his lack of warmth and compassion. Romney opposes abortion and same-sex marriage, and he wants to see illegal immigrants sent home.

In this election campaign, the subject of illegal immigration has become a tautology and little more than window dressing. Naturally, most Americans are against things illegal, and Romney has astutely turned the issue of immigration into one of illegal immigration - of beefed-up border patrols, of erecting tall walls along the border and of sending Mexicans back to Mexico. The fear of foreigners - of Mexicans and Asians - is rampant among Republican voters, even here in Iowa, here in the heart of America.

Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York who came to prominence in the wake of 9/11, portrays himself as a tough and moral leader, and yet his own children and ex-wives describe him differently, and one of his closest associates was a corrupt chief of police. According to opinion polls, Giuliani consistently loses a few percentage points in places where voters have actually encountered him in person.

Fred Thompson, once a shining hope for many Republicans, a senator and former actor on the hit TV series “Law & Order,” a man who was touted as a new Ronald Reagan, sits listlessly in a corner in Fort Dodge, waiting to be introduced as “the next president.” When he takes to the small stage at this campaign appearance, he tells his audience: “Help is on the way.” But he has dark circles under his eyes, his voice is uninspiring, he doesn’t look anyone in the eye, and he still refers to Russia as the Soviet Union and says “Nobel Peace Prize” when he means the Nobel Prize for Medicine. All of 50 people have come to hear Thompson speak at what is a decidedly less than glamorous event.

At least he has a sense of humor. When asked what he considers his most precious asset, Thompson says “my young trophy wife” (she is 24 years his junior). And what does he do for fun? “Attend campaign events.”

Mike Huckabee probably owes it to the weakness of the current lineup that he is currently leading in all opinion polls among Republican voters in Iowa. Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and a former preacher, is a strong speaker, and his voters believe him when he says that he believes in God. But now that Huckabee is being taken seriously, his adversaries have begun digging around in his past, a past that includes campaign contributions from the tobacco industry and a rapist who was released during his governorship and then went on to commit a murder.

“I never pardoned a murderer,” says Huckabee’s opponent Mitt Romney. “These are the usual dirty tactics,” says Huckabee during an afternoon appearance in Des Moines, the capital of Iowa. “It’s the sort of thing people do when they’re behind. But being the target of negative campaigning is better than no attention at all.” Of course, the affable Mr. Huckabee has also proven to be adept at slinging mud with the best of them. “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus Christ and the devil are brothers?” he asked rhetorically in the New York Times Magazine. And then he issued an apology, yet another element of the modern election campaign: the public apology as the perfection of the perfidious.

A candidate who apologizes comes across as morally superior. By apologizing, a candidate manages to focus attention on himself, and to take advantage of the moment to repeat the insult - all the while emphasizing the apology, of course.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign played it nice for a while, when their candidate was still safely at the head of the Democratic pack. The only candidates who can afford to be pleasant in American political campaigns are the clear frontrunners and those who are hopelessly behind. But Clinton’s nice days are over. A campaign manager recently reminded Democratic voters that Barack Obama smoked marijuana and snorted cocaine in his youth (”Of course I inhaled,” Obama said, “that was the idea”), and that he was even naïve enough to have admitted to doing both. The Republicans, the Clinton campaign manager pointed out, would eventually use Obama’s naiveté against him in 2008.

Of course, Hillary was quick to apologize that a member of her staff had discussed Obama and cocaine without her permission. And, of course, her apology put the words Obama and cocaine back in the same sentence - and in the headlines. “I think we’ve made it clear,” said Clinton campaign manager Mark Penn, “that the subject of cocaine isn’t something our campaign would bring up in any way, shape or form.”

“He said cocaine!” Joe Trippi exclaimed at an evening appearance in Iowa. Trippi is the campaign manager for John Edward, another of Obama’s rivals.

“I think you just said cocaine,” Mark Penn repeated one last time. The remark was met with diabolical smiles and congratulatory handshakes, as the Clinton campaign team boarded a helicopter to their candidate’s next appearance in yet another of Iowa’s election districts.

It seems that the cards are currently being reshuffled in the Democratic camp. After months of Hillary Clinton being touted as the country’s first female president, Obama has caught up in several states, has even moved ahead of Clinton in Iowa and is still in second place nationwide. But both candidates face tough challenges in the American electorate. Will male voters in mid-America, in places like Wisconsin, Texas and Iowa, allow a liberal woman from New York to run the country? Will voters in the South elect a black president?

According to most opinion polls, the answer to both questions is yes, but no one knows how honest America is.

The differences between the Clinton and Obama platforms are minimal. Hillary is more radical when it comes to healthcare reform. Obama is more radical on the issue of Iraq. He is more credible on Iraq, because Senator Clinton voted for the war in the first place. But aside from these differences, the two leading Democratic candidates are offering voters similar concepts and are both adept at presenting their ideas eloquently and in similar terms. Both Clinton and Obama are skilled communicators, skilled at the art of conversing, and both are clearly enjoying the experience.

Because of these similarities, Democrats have been paying more attention in recent weeks to the aspiring candidates’ personalities. Obama emphasizes change and new policies. He rarely goes on the offensive and remains consistently calm. He has his message and sticks to it. But what does this mean? That he is too nice to be president? Or does it mean that he is at peace with himself, much more so than the ambitious Clinton? But, then again, isn’t 46 too young to be president, and aren’t 35 months in the Senate too little experience? Does America need Obama’s freshness or Clinton’s experience? And which of the two could reunite and lead the country? These are the questions Democrats are asking themselves.

Oprah Winfrey is an American force. Books she recommends on her top-rated talk show shoot to the top of the best-seller lists within hours. And when she appeared next to Obama on a stage in Iowa early last week, 30,000 people came to hear him speak.

Suddenly Obama was a rock star. And when Oprah Winfrey said that she had given a lot of thought to which of the candidates she could trust, which of them ought to be taken seriously in this election, the applause was so deafening that it all but drowned out her response: Barack Obama.

The Clinton team kept a relatively low profile during those two days. But she was back, of course, and of course she continues to fight, and of course she has too much money, power and ambitious to simply continue as if nothing had happened.

For months Clinton portrayed herself as the stateswoman, as being above the fray, the only adult in a contest with a dozen adolescent boys. But then, suddenly, in a television debate in late October, Clinton faltered. She delivered a long, confusing response to a question about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s proposal to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, and when she was asked to name her favorite baseball team she replied that it was the New York Yankees. Then she paused and said: “And the Chicago Cubs.” It was as if Kurt Beck, the leader of Germany’s Social Democrats, were to announce that he supported rival German football teams Bayern Munchen and FC St. Pauli. It was the most opportunistic of all possible responses, the sort of mistake a candidate in this election campaign should avoid at all costs.

Perhaps Mrs. Clinton had simply let her guard down, perhaps she had underestimated her opponents or perhaps she had failed to notice that the men’s club on the debate stage had it in for her. The television debates since then have followed the same general pattern, as the men on the stage jockey in an everyone-get-the-girl mode.

Anyone who spends a few days with Hillary Clinton today will experience a candidate who takes the time to shake hands, to look her potential voters in the eye and to engage in brief conversations with people who approach her after her appearances. It is afterwards that Hillary Clinton shows her softer side, her ability to listen - and that she can be a warm-hearted woman, after all.

And yet when she speaks, Clinton reveals a new toughness. She talks about how her father set himself three goals in life: a small business, a family and a house - and about how her mother added a fourth goal: Their children would go to college. The family, she says, achieved all four goals.

Then Clinton announces her own four goals. She tells her audience that she wants to reestablish “America’s leadership role in the world,” because the “days of cowboy diplomacy are over.” It’s a sentence she repeats again and again, day after day. She wants the American middle class to prosper once again, her second goal. And she wants the government to place qualified people in the right positions. Finally, her fourth goal: “How about securing our children’s future?”

“Iowa, the entire country and the world will be watching you,” Hillary Clinton tells her audience at the end of her speech. Her Iowa campaign is called the “Every District Counts” tour, and she is traveling the state by helicopter. She calls this final spurt, this show of strength, her Blitz, and the reference to the word “Blitzkrieg” is clearly no accident. She is accompanied by her mother, actors and other “people,” as she says, “whose lives I’ve changed.”

This last push in this segment of the campaign was Bill Clinton’s idea. It’s not enough to come across as superior and competent, the former president told his wife. The magic word in this first election campaign after Bush, he said, is “change.” Hillary, taking his advice, now says that the American people will face a choice among those who talk about change (a reference to John Edwards), those who fervently hope for change (Obama, naturally) and, finally, Hillary Clinton, a woman who has learned to be tough after fighting many battles, a woman who has spent her life changing the lives of others - for the better, of course.

A preliminary decision - nothing more, nothing less - will be made here in Iowa on Jan. 3. The real race begins after that. Besides, making it through this sort of a campaign - surviving the line of fire, spending 16 hours a day, day after day, in the limelight - is all just a test, and yet it has little to do with what happens after victory in November.

... Romney has astutely turned the issue of immigration into one of illegal immigration

Unbelievable. It is exactly the other way around. It is leftists who turn the issue of illegal immigration into one of immigration.

Wow. And these people are allowed to breed. Thankfully they engage in activities that preclude that.

Of course that explains why they are going after our kids in government schools.

Iowa - a flat state of corn, cows and the occasional small town.

Where is this flat part of Iowa? I live in the Central Valley of California. This is flat, Iowa is not.

Apparently the author has never been there, so why should I believe anything he writes?

Some parts of Iowa are flat, but most are rolling hills. I’d guess the author (no name given) has either not been there or didn’t care to look around if they ever were.

Mitt Romney worked as a corporate consultant

He took a failing company and turned into one worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Chelsea Clinton is a hundred thousand dollar a year "consultant" for a business she knew nothing about. Not quite the same thing though the same word.

“Hillary, taking his advice, now says that the American people will face a choice among those who talk about change (a reference to John Edwards),”

I wonder if Edwards read this?

Several paragraphs of “Pubbies, bad,” several more of Obama better than you thought and Hillary just being Hillary (with a Bill accent) and Iowa being too white to trust with such weighty decisions...

It must be hell breathing all the way up there...

But both candidates face tough challenges in the American electorate. Will male voters in mid-America, in places like Wisconsin, Texas and Iowa, allow a liberal woman from New York to run the country? Will voters in the South elect a black president? According to most opinion polls, the answer to both questions is yes, but no one knows how honest America is.

Sounds to me like the Rats are making excuses for losing already. Clearly America is dishonest... a nation of woman-hating bigots for not voting for them.

“...The point of lowest elevation is Keokuk in southeastern Iowa, at 480 feet (146 m). The point of highest elevation, at 1670 feet (509 m), is Hawkeye Point, ...”

Romney lacks “warmth and compassion” because he “opposes abortion and same-sex marriage”?

Only in SF would killing babies and destroying families be characterized as signs of “compassion.”

I am from Iowa and lived in San Francisco for awhile. Nice area in many ways. It’s funny because the Bay area had very strong agricultural roots until recently.
And many there are from the Midwest originally.

The thing that I noticed about the natives however: is that they are very provincial. They know very of our nation outside of the Bay area or Los Angeles.
Most Midwesterners that I know tend to travel and have knowledge of other areas around our great nation.

I have never heard of the San Francisco Sentinel; but it has the big city, uninformed, snotty attitude nailed.

Thank God people like this are not voting first in the nation.

There are smart thinkers at every medium-sized newspaper in America and astute analysts at every television station...

Could have fooled me.

I have never heard of the San Francisco Sentinel

As far as I know, the San Francisco Sentinel is a web-only left-wing rag aimed at the San Francisco demographic. I don't think it has a real high credibility profile outside its small circle of friends.

a liberal woman from New York to run the country?

LIBERAL? Most Definitely
WOMAN? Questionable
New Yorker? NO WAY, at best she is a carpet bagger.
I try not to listen to her, when she speaks does she have the Brooklynese down pat? you know TOITY TOID etc..?

The United States is a country that likes to explain democracy to other nations.

The US is a republic not a democracy.

“And these people are allowed to breed” Actually, what is the population growth for people who would read this article? Are they breeding? :)

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