AME RI CAN P OL I TI CS

The Presidential Circus

Simon Radford

THE Iowa State Fair this year boasted a life-size butter sculpture of Harry Potter, a 1,203-pound hog and, in all probability, the next Commander-in-Chief of the world’s only superpower. Nothing typifies the Iowa primaries more than an ambitious politician discussing the intricacies of the Central American Free Trade Agreement while munching on a deepfried twinky. For all the talk of Obama’s blogging strategy, or Hillary’s national security team, the ability to be at home on a Des Moines farm or in a diner in Nashua, New Hampshire, is far more crucial to a candidate’s campaign than the opinion of the Washington commentariat. A common refrain among TV anchors and morning show hosts is that the election campaigns seem to start earlier each time. They are not wrong. Ever since John Kerry emerged from his home in Boston’s Beacon Hill to concede the 2004 election to George W. Bush, every politician aiming at making a run in 2008 has been travelling to early-voting states and signing up influential local operatives. John Edwards has been such a consistent visitor that nearly all Iowans seem to have bumped into him at some point, and Republican Tommy Thompson boasted of visiting each of Iowa’s 99 counties before a lack of funding forced him to bow out. Victory in the early primaries provides perhaps the only opportunity for lesser-known and less wellfunded candidates to derail the much-anticipated ClintonGuiliani Battle Royale. After all, it has been done before. John F. Kennedy was viewed as an unseasoned political naïïf when he started trawling the country in 1959 to garner votes among the Democratic electorate. The young pretender was certain to be frustrated in his over-sized political ambitions by the cooler heads of party bosses who favoured either twice-beaten Adlai Stevenson, Senate majority leader Lyndon Baines Johnson, or the Minnesota populism of Hubert Humphrey. By March 1960, the voters of West Virginia were in a position to award the nomination to Kennedy or to back Humphrey and to throw the contest into the hands of powerbrokers at the party convention. An early poll predicted that Kennedy would trounce Humphrey, but loyalties quickly

changed as county chairs in charge of getting out the vote informed the campaign that “no one knew he was a Catholic” when the poll was taken. However, intense training of precinct leaders, door-to-door canvassing and stumping across the State finally handed victory to Kennedy and set him on the road to the Presidency. An ongoing struggle between party grassroots and Washington ‘Pooh Bahs’ has been waged ever since. This dynamic has recurred in almost every electoral cycle: hippies got ‘clean for Gene’ as Senator Eugene McCarthy knocked LBJ out of contention in the snows of New Hampshire in 1968; Gary Hart masterminded both a change in party rules and the primary campaign of George McGovern in 1972, as well as his own insurgent run for office 12 years later; Governor Michael Dukakis showcased his ‘miracle in Massachusetts’ all the way to his party’s nomination and a subsequent crushing General Election defeat; and Howard Dean rewrote the rules of modern Presidential campaigning by demonstrating that the governor of a political backwater like Vermont could give the Democratic establishment a collective fright by raising vast sums of money online. Some of these radical approaches ended in failure, but all of them changed the manual of how to run a winning campaign. By focusing on the ins-and-outs of Bill Clinton’s schedule, or why Giuliani’s son refuses to campaign for his father, most newspapers are missing the emerging strategies that will define this race. Most polls in Iowa show John Edwards leading the more established campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Some data has Obama in a slight lead in New Hampshire, with the third real test in South Carolina appearing to be a three-way tie. If Obama or Edwards can win two out of these three states by organising enough precinct captains, attending all of the state fairs, union meetings and party dinners, and generating enough political momentum, then they could each increase both their cash on hand and national poll ratings to compete in the crucial ‘Super Tuesday’ primaries on February 5th, when as many as 16 states –including the big media markets of California, New York and New Jersey –are due to pick

28 | The Liberal | Autumn 2007