The race is probably much closer than the latest Des Moines Register poll indicates. Or at least that's what Kamala Harris, the San Francisco District Attorney who is one of Barack Obama's few political endorsers from northern California, told me over morning coffee. Kamala, her brother and her sister are in Des Moines to work for Barack through the caucus. So I try to keep Kamala's admonition in mind at the New Year's Day Obama canvass rally mid-morning at Roosevelt High School in Des Moines. But it's hard. I've tagged along on four Obama slogs in California and Tennessee, and never more than twenty people have showed to walk the walk. Probably 1500 people crowd the gymnasium; there have to be 150 press squeezed onto the press scaffold. The Register poll, their last before caucus, shows Obama up seven points over Clinton. It's hard for Obama, too, not to believe. "After ten months in Iowa, you have vindicated my faith in the American people," he says. "We stand on the verge of doing something very very special." After Barack speaks--his buoyant mood matched by that of his supporters--small groups of true believers head out to canvass in the hard bright cold.
By late New Year's Day Obama, as well as Clinton and Edwards, have speechified as fast as their cavalcade can bus from town to town. I catch up with all three by nightfall in Council Bluffs, on the western edge of Iowa, cheek-by-jowl with Omaha, Nebraska. Here the smaller plains of Iowa give way to the Great Plains, a vastness immediately expressed in the Paul Bunyan scale of railyards and truck depots, storage towers and grain elevators, Peterbilt and Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World. In the local convention center, next to the red and gold neon-lighted Horseshoe Casino, a country music combo plays for a harder crowd than I've seen so far. They're stony-faced, they're sedate, they're not easily persuaded or pleased. Mostly, they're older couples, many probably retired, although there are people in their thirties and forties, some of the men with long braids or ponytails, suspendered backs and workcaps. Hillary Clinton finds them tough nuts to crack.
From the beginning, she seems off her game, with an odd comment about George Bush. "He has injected into the American bloodstream a sense of fatalism." Not surprisingly, she elicits no response. Nor does she when she goes on too long about Protestant and Catholic families in northern Ireland. This bit of recent history means nothing out here where the prairie meets the plaiin. Her mention of family farmers in upstate New York is met with pointed silence. Clinton seems not to know where she is. Perhaps this is why she pronounces on foreign policy in a way she must know is untrue. "We make decisions for the sole reason in the world that we need the oil supply." Maybe the Ron Paul gadflies have gotten to her.
Not surprisingly, there are more press at the Obama rally in Council Bluffs an hour later. Here, in the auditorium of a school for the blind, there is no country music combo, no padded chairs. There are a few bleachers; everybody else stands. The crowd is a third smaller than at the Clinton event. Everybody is younger; everybody seems to be a supporter. This is an important distinction. Nobody here is shopping. At least in the convention center, the audience, if phlegmatic, were potentials. Obama himself, hoarser than in the morning, is still relaxed and sunny and unable to resist the siren call of that last poll. "Block by block, precinct by precinct, county by county, state by state, we will win!" Like Clinton at the beginning of campaign season, he is already scouting the larger vistas.
Appearances are deceiving at both events, for many Nebraskans have come out in the minus degrees weather to hear Clinton and Obama. Also at the Edwards rally, billed as a 10 P.M. "thank you" meeting of Edwards with his volunteer staff in Council Bluffs, everything is not what it seems. The tiny campaign cottage, in a working class neighborhood, is packed like an old-fashioned phone booth. Despite the closeness, we women stamp our feet against the cold. Outside, despite the wind chill factor, men line the curb holding Edwards signs. One of the men is wrapped in an old blanket printed with teddy bears. The Edwards bus is, of course, late. As we women begin to talk among ourselves, it comes out that not everyone is an Edwards supporter. There are a number of Obama infiltrators. Two old women are "for Hillary," but they have come to hear Edwards "just because." I'm amazed at their stamina. It's freezing, it's near midnight, and we've all been standing in a squeeze for over an hour. A University of Iowa student says he will caucus for Ron Paul, but he likes to hear all the candidates. Sometimes I can hardly believe how Iowans love politics.
Finally, Edwards arrives, heralded by an inrush of the bus press, who shove aside the carpenters and steelworkers, the true believers, who have been waiting to see their man. (Not that I should be saying anything here.) I'm pushed forward so close to Edwards that I can touch him. I feel a twinge of guilt, which I assuage by noticing that Edwards never makes eye contact, but gazes slightly over everyone's head. His words, the muscles in his cheek flexing like snapped wires, are brief and passionate; taking a page from 2004, he says that for the last four days they've been feeling the movement in their direction.
Movement is here with the snow flurries. Every Democrat from Council Bluffs I've talked to says the same thing. "In the end, I'd be happy with any of them." The pleased-to-be-here far outnumber the fiercely committed. Perhaps this roundelay for caucus is symptomatic of and a necessary precursor to the seismic shift in the American electorate that many sense may be on the horizon.