Sprawled in a lounge chair by the elevators in the Hotel Fort Des Moines about 9:30 p.m. on New Year's Eve, still in my puffy brown coat and sand/ice-caked snow boots, I'm awaiting clearance to go to my room. The Secret Service and Clinton staffers have blocked access to the bank of elevators. One of the lifts is open and ready for the candidate as soon as she arrives. I hear the women calling out her ETA as they talk to the campaign bus on I-80.
Suddenly, Hillary Clinton is in. I hardly recognize her. In the few seconds before the elevator doors close, she doesn't realize that she is being watched. The woman I glimpse--drained and beyond mere exhaustion--is etched in my memory forever. For the first time since 1992, I feel something for her. The only way I can describe her expression is that of a stage actress who has just given everything to an evening's performance of Desdemona or Lady Macbeth and is still in that in-between space where she has not found herself again. Probably in the last few hours she has been told that the finalDes Moines Register poll before caucus, a poll that in the past has been predictive and will be published in the morning, shows her seven points down to Barack Obama, where the margin of error is only 3.5.
Only three hours earlier at a Clinton rally in Muscatine, I was just saying to myself how great Hillary Clinton looks. Here she is bouncing on stage with clothes, make-up and hair pulled together, projecting an appealing aura of energy and glow. Here she is an hour late, after busing through snow flurries on icy roads, for her fourth campaign appearance of the day and yet she still has something to give the school auditorium crowd that waits in a bright expectant mood as the afternoon turns into dark. For some of the citizens of Muscatine, who are here with their children and parents, this is the New Year's Eve celebration. Many wear pointed party hats. The local HRC volunteers have provided a free repast of hot chocolate and strawberries.
I had heard that Clinton rallies in Iowa have taken on the air of a daytime TV game show, and Muscatine bears this out. A young man--an HRC advance person from his assured demeanor and speaking skills--entertains the crowd of 300 while we wait. Like a fledgling Bob Barker, he runs us through a Hillary Clinton trivia quiz. Where was she born? A lot of people know this. Where did she go to law school? Not so many. Confoundingly, few know what state she represents in the Senate. But when our Mr. Barker asks how many people Hillary's health plan will cover, everybody chimes in unison "EVERYBODY!" As prizes are awarded for first correct answers, it occurs to me that the details of Hillary Clinton's life, like Barack Obama's, have a mythic quality, as if they were competing Octavians for a new Augustan Age. The futility of going up against such iconic status is a reason candidates like Joe Biden and Chris Dodd have never been able to break the percentage barrier in Iowa.
Hillary Clinton in Muscatine is about the best I've ever heard her. She's not a great orator like Barack Obama or a mesmerizer like John Edwards, but she knows how to keep her talking points, minute by minute, in touch and in synch with the lives of the Iowans in the room in a way that the two men, who quickly fly to generalities, do not. Her strength is in her focus on the details, both in policy and in the lives of consituents. First thing, she mentions the 6,700 Iowans facing foreclosure. You could hear a pin drop in the room for a second. She makes her now-familiar assertion that, "You get change by working really really hard for it, not by hoping for it." Because this is a not-so subtle criticism of Barack Obama, what is often lost is that these words are a good expression of her own ethic and fit her well.
Hillary at her best is the way she ends her speech. "You'll be caucusing for people who can't be there," she says to the people before her. "For the soldier on patrol in Afghanistan, for the people who work at night, at the corner store, the airport, in law enforcement; for the nurses, for the doctors and nurses working the emergency room in Muscatine." All the candidates in their stump speeches mention individual Americans, and one reason the press is cynical is because it's always the same people, always a sob story, manipulatively used in the speech. Clinton has many such stories ("the nurse from Davenport with breast cancer," "the poor Chinese village woman who said she had heard about my speech on women's rights," "the soldier at Walter Reed"); at her best, like in Muscatine, she convinces her listeners that she feels their pain.
Or not. For all her vibrancy and dazzle, Clinton's acquiring an aura of inauthenticity. Here is how she now testifies to her experience. "When I got to the White House in '92, there were a lot of problems on the desk in the Oval Office." But Iowans are not stupid; they recognize this elision of her White House years with her husband's. When Clinton points to one of the babies in the auditorium and says, "There's $30,000 of our national debt resting on her tiny shoulders," probably some of the Muscatiners find the moment as smarmy as I do. In talking about her "work on every continent," there's just a whiff of condescension in her mention of "the poor village women on dirt floors" she has met. Clinton's persona in Iowa is a bit molly-coddling now. This is way too Mommy for most high school and college students, and if they turn out in force for caucus, they may validate the Des Moines Register poll.
In the ladies room on my way out, I eavesdrop on three Muscatiners. One woman asks her friend, "Well?" The friend replies, "Hillary. I'm going with Hillary." From her tone and moment of hesitation, it's clear she has heard other candidates and has given her caucus vote some thought. She has just made up her mind. The third friend says, "huh." It's not clear, from the response, what she means.