Mayhill Fowler, HuffPost's OffTheBus correspondent who's covered the Barack Obama grassroots beat (among her many pieces, check out "Battle Plan: An Exclusive Look Inside Barack Obama's Plan To Win California"), will be covering the Obama grassroots in Iowa up until the caucus. Below is the first of her journal entries before she lands in Des Moines tomorrow.
For months I've prepared for this moment and now that I'm packing my belongings into a bag I can easily tote around with me, I can't help but wonder, Why does January 3, 2008 attract so much media to Des Moines? What is it about the caucus itself that's taking me from my comfortable home and friends in the Bay area? Is it the process, or wanting to be there for the results?
Truth be told, the Iowa caucuses have been on national radar only since 1972 and have never been a reliable predictor of a final party choice. For the seven no-incumbent Democratic caucuses, of the nine total since '72, only three times has the Iowa winner been the party nominee.
Some say this year is different, that the crush results from that general feeling out in the zeitgeist that Election 2008 could be seminal. I'm not saying there isn't reason to look out for the caucus results, but that doesn't explain why reporters are crawling through cornfields and driving through snowy pastures to "see Iowa." And it definitely doesn't explain the trouble it's taken to get me here. There were no rooms left in downtown Des Moines, as the group of us OffTheBus correspondents crazy enough to cover the Iowa caucuses discovered a month ago. With persistence, I managed to snag a reservation at the Hotel Fort Des Moines after the Clinton Campaign decided to rent fewer rooms.
Or is it just as likely that modern media sprawl is also the event? Not so long ago there were no bloggers or videographers or "citizen journalists" like me at the caucus, no Blackberries or cellphones or broadband or RSS feeds -- my God, no cable TV. Watch it today, and one of the most fascinating things you'll notice about The War Room, the documentary on the '72 Clinton Campaign, is the way in which George Stephanopoulos hovers over fax machines.
Given my proclivity for religious metaphors to explain daily events, I see the press headed to Iowa as Magi and entourage. We OffTheBussers are some of the camel drivers. All of us, great and small, are journeying toward the possibility of truth, even some shard of it, a bit of knowledge that may illumine this changed course for our country that we anticipate, even though most of what we bring back likely will be the bumptious experience of the caravan itself. The influx of press, as it further weights the ratio of reporters to reported, also shifts the perspective, which some of the time has been "up close and personal" in Iowa. From the more typical American viewpoint, however, candidates appear both larger-than-life and diminished, flattened, like paper dolls. It's the consequence of distance: geography, or the space provided by a podium and handlers, or the protective shell stamped don't come closer with which the famous surround themselves. But large numbers of press on the scene begin to change picture and meaning. In his poem entitled "Presepio" in the Richard Wilbur translation, Joseph Brodsky imagines looking down on a nativity scene nestled in cotton-batting snow as a way to capture the play between large and small, significant and not so. With a shift in perspective, Brodsky turns round the way in which we usually express the relationship between mere humanity and larger truths. "Like a midnight passerby/ who finds the pane of some small hut aglow,/ you peer from the cosmos at this little show. " In a sense, the press are the midnight passersby of the little show in Iowa. As if picking up and putting down the figures in a creche, with our attentiveness we alter the scene, as much as, Magi-like, bestowing significance upon it. Will the oft-printed allegation out of Arkansas that Mike Huckabee is mean-spirited contribute to an Iowa disappointment? Will the fact that media stars like Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd have joined the lemming migration from Hillaryland upstage for caucusers Clinton's assiduous re-courting of Iowans? Will press and poll rankings of John Edwards as "third" make him so? We watch and wait.
In the meantime, I'll be chiming in on the smaller comings and goings in Des Moines before heading off to Iowa City to cover one of its caucuses. OffTheBusser Kelly Nuxoll and I are sharing for a few days before she heads up to Dubuque - she'd better bring earplugs! (And can't say I didn't warn her!) Starting tomorrow we'll be reporting back from the HFDM bar, when we're not ambulance chasing candidates through Iowa's frozen cornfields or pressing our noses against the glass of the 801 Steak & Chop, where evidently the media bigwigs like to pig out. When in Rome, I suppose, ... although personally I can too vividly picture the feedlots next to my dad's childhood home outside Mason City.