In his sermon, John Tank didn’t quite tell the congregation at Grace West Church who to support for president. But that doesn’t mean the church’s assistant pastor shied away from politics on the last Sunday before the Iowa caucuses. “As a Christian, how do I stand up for what I believe? Maybe this year, it’s actually participating in the caucus,” Tank said. “This country is in desperate, dire need of Christian leadership.”
And at Grace West — and among many other communities of fervent conservative Christians across Iowa — there’s not much doubt which candidate that means. “Mike Huckabee,” said Kevin Charter, a computer programmer, after services. “He’s a follower of Jesus Christ. I just believe that he will lead our country with that faith and that truth.” For his part, Tank is also supporting Huckabee (as, he believes, are most members of his flock), though IRS regulations for nonprofit groups mean he could not say so from the pulpit.
In the closing days of a Republican race teetering between Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, strategists for both sides agree that Huckabee has enormous support among Iowa’s evangelical Christians. What no one really knows, however, is what that will translate into on caucus night. Turnout is crucial, and Huckabee’s campaign has not had the cash to build a campaign organization that can guarantee that his supporters will come out en masse. In essence, the once obscure Baptist preacher turned GOP insurgent is depending on, well, a leap of faith.
If conservative evangelicals wind up leading Huckabee to victory in Iowa, it may well be because they got their own vote out. While Romney’s team is executing a massive, well-planned ground operation (like the leading Democratic candidates, who have their own enormous turnout machines in motion here), Huckabee’s operatives can’t really say for sure how many of his supporters will show up.
“That’s everybody’s guess,” Bob VanderPlaats, Huckabee’s state chairman, said with a laugh Saturday, when I asked him about turnout. Many of Huckabee’s supporters were turned on to his campaign by friends, fellow home-schoolers, church members or family — the sort of informal, preexisting networks and social ties that are considered more valuable than gold in the world of political organizing. But that means Huckabee’s shoestring campaign doesn’t have much in the way of reliable data, since his voters did more to find Huckabee than the other way around. Many Christian conservatives I talked to this week said they hadn’t had a lot of official contact with Huckabee’s team before they decided to back him. “It’s not a superficial e-mail campaign, it’s real,” said John King, another computer programmer, who lives in Pella, Iowa, where he and his wife are home-schooling their six children. “It’s moms having a weekly Bible study, and it’s home-school dads having a basketball game together,” said King’s friend Greg Hartsill, who lives in Columbia, Iowa, and is home-schooling seven kids. “It’s wherever we meet in life.”
For voters like them, Huckabee’s appeal is pretty plain. “He fears God,” said Scott Bailey, from just outside Otley, Iowa, where he’s president of a network of conservative Christian home-schoolers. “Apart from that, nothing else matters to me in a candidate.” As he gave his stump speech at rallies over the last few days, Huckabee was occasionally interrupted by a “Praise God!” exclaimed from the audience. In Pella, a supporter had him autograph a copy of an intelligent-design textbook (though Huckabee, who famously indicated at a GOP debate in May that he didn’t believe in evolution, prefers these days not to talk about exactly how humans arrived on Earth).
The campaign is well aware of who makes up his base. Huckabee ran one commercial calling himself a “Christian leader.” His Christmas ad veered far from the usual fare, telling Iowans it was time to remember that “what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Christ” (and, of course, prompting an only-in-politics controversy about the whether the cross-shaped bookshelf behind him was sending a coded message to viewers). His response to attacks from Romney has been to remind caucus goers how much longer Huckabee has been against abortion and gay marriage than his rival. And allies in a group called “Trust Huckabee” have been running their own ads, independent from the Huckabee operation, highlighting Romney’s earlier, less conservative positions on those issues, which are at the top of the minds of many Christian conservatives.
Yet Huckabee’s standard speeches these days include less talk about God or faith or family values. He’s focusing mostly on a populist economic message and on defending his Arkansas record on taxes and criminal pardons, under attack from a barrage of Romney ads. He clearly draws support from more than just church groups, too. Plenty of people who listened to him speak recently said they liked his easygoing manner, or his support for the FairTax plan (which would abolish the IRS and set up a national sales tax), without mentioning his religious views at all. Newly arrived campaign manager Ed Rollins said in an interview Saturday that advisors believe Huckabee has already gotten his faith across to people who want to hear about it; now it’s time to shift to a broader message.
Still, aides of rivals and as well as Huckabee’s are putting great weight on the evangelical vote, historically a reliable bloc of caucus-goers, as they look ahead to Thursday. But some of the people who are most excited about Huckabee will be attending caucuses for the first time, which always leaves campaigns worried about whether they’ll make it there. “My wife’s never been to caucus that I can remember, but she says she’s going with me this time,” said John Shaull, a Huckabee supporter who leads a team of Southern Baptist pastors in the Des Moines area. “And my son and daughter, who’ve never been to one, are saying, ‘Hey, Dad, tell us more about it.’” Republican caucuses aren’t as complicated as those for the Democrats in Iowa, but the experience is still different enough from regular voting to be confusing. Like many other candidates, Huckabee is distributing a “Caucus 101″ instructional DVD at his events. Unlike many other candidates, Huckabee opens his by asking caucus-goers to pray on his behalf.
Meanwhile, the Christian vote is apparently not sacrosanct when it comes to the kind of dirty tricks that pop up late in every close election. At Grace West, John Tank showed the congregation an anonymous mailing he got last week, with no return address, warning pastors not to talk about politics at all or they’d “end up in the slammer.” It was addressed, “Dear Fellow Christian,” and seemed designed to scare the clergy at churches whose believers might turn out for Huckabee if their pastors made the caucuses a focus. (Romney, though, has been the victim of much nastier mail, in several states, playing on evangelical skepticism about his Mormon faith. Naturally, every campaign denies involvement in any of that.)
While state campaign chairman VanderPlaats says Huckabee voters are more likely to turn out than others because his candidate gives supporters something different to believe in, counting on some of the most devout people in the state can pose some unique challenges. Take Amy Banwart, who lives in West Des Moines and works at Grace West. She says she is 100 percent behind Huckabee, whom she calls “a believer in Christ Jesus, the only way to salvation,” and she thinks he’ll fight to end abortion and keep traditional marriage the only legal kind. But she won’t be caucusing Thursday because, as she put it, she feels God calling her to coach the church’s youth basketball team in a game that night instead.
A much bigger obstacle could be the Huckabee campaign’s sheer lack of infrastructure. The Iowa campaign manager, Eric Woolson, told me “we will have the resources” needed to put on a ground game. And Huckabee aides say they’re identifying 1,000 new voters daily. But Huckabee has only 14 paid staffers, while Romney has 10 full-time field staff in Iowa alone and “a couple hundred” volunteers organized in all 99 counties, according to his state spokesman, Tim Albrecht. “Romney seems to have a much stronger grass-roots effort at trying to pull people out to the caucuses in his support than Huckabee does,” said Mike Demastus, the pastor at the Fort Des Moines Church of Christ, who’s supporting Huckabee. “Huckabee is just, kind of, I think, maybe a little bit taking for granted that they’re going to come out.” Demastus got four phone calls from Romney’s campaign on Saturday alone, asking whether he would support Romney. Every time he said he was for Huckabee, the caller asked patiently if there was anything that could change his mind. He’s gotten almost no calls from Huckabee.
If Huckabee does win Iowa, in spite of Romney’s superior operation built on millions of dollars, it would represent the kind of triumph of passion over organization that this state manages to produce every now and then. But that’s not what Huckabee calls it. During an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday (which aired in Des Moines just before most church services got under way), Tim Russert asked him if a victory here would be a miracle. “By my definition?” the one-time clergyman responded. “Yes, it would.”
DES MOINES, Iowa — The world, clearly, was not prepared for Joe-mentum in New Hampshire four years ago. Are Iowans ready for Mo-Joe ’08?
If Sen. Joe Biden’s campaign can be believed, maybe. The Bidenistas are busy telling reporters around the state that their man is poised to do better than anyone expected in Thursday’s caucuses (even if Mo-Joe ’08 doesn’t seem like a slogan destined to produce results). The two-time Democratic presidential candidate and his entire family are barnstorming Iowa, trying to drum up enough support to move on to New Hampshire with a strong fourth-place — or, less likely, a surprise third-place — finish here. And if there is a Biden mini-surge building, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto might help move it along, as caucus-goers seek out a candidate with foreign policy chops. “We’ve been making the argument that Joe Biden is the one person who’s really equipped to lead from day one,” said Biden’s communications director, Larry Rasky. “Hillary can talk about experience, but Joe Biden actually has it.” As for other candidates, Biden aides point out that while John Edwards got a lot of press for calling Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf after Bhutto’s death, Musharraf called Biden, who has been on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for years.
A wholly unscientific sampling of people at events for other Democratic candidates does turn up some evidence that, in fact, Biden is getting a second look as the caucuses approach. The problem is, it’s not clear how many of his supporters believe he’s going to do well enough for them to stick by him through the end of the night.
“I’m a Republican, but I will change, and I do plan to caucus,” said a retired farmer at a Hillary Clinton rally in Mount Pleasant Wednesday, who didn’t want to give his name. “I’ll support Biden … I guess next I’d go for Obama in the second round.” Another likely caucus-goer, who also wanted to keep his name out of print (apparently Biden supporters are trying to keep it a secret), told me at a Barack Obama rally Thursday in Des Moines that he had switched his allegiances recently. “I was for Biden, but I think Obama’s got a better chance,” he said. “I want anyone but Hillary.” A social worker from Fairfield, Deborah Pogel, told Salon’s Walter Shapiro Saturday night at an Obama rally that she was strongly leaning toward caucusing for Biden even though she doubted he’d make it to the second round of votes.
The difficult part for Biden may be that Clinton is stealing his theme — and she’s got a lot more money for TV ads than he does. They’re both pitching themselves as the experienced candidate who can step into the Oval Office immediately. Biden’s recent ad, “Office,” isn’t that different from Clinton’s “Stakes.” Recognizing that he can’t compete with Obama to be a breath of fresh air after Biden’s 35 years in the Senate, his staff says any votes he picks up are coming from the ranks of caucus-goers that either Clinton or Edwards is counting on.
On Thursday, Biden needs to carve out some precincts where he can hold on to at least 15 percent support, the threshold Iowa Democrats require for a candidate to be “viable” — that is, for Biden’s supporters not to be forced to move on to their second choice. He knows it, and refreshingly, he isn’t above saying so. At a campaign stop in Des Moines Wednesday, Biden told the audience (including Shapiro, who passed along the quote — we Roadies share and share alike):
If I hear one more person say to me, “Biden, I think you’re the most qualified but I don’t think you can win the caucus,” I am going to … [here, he paused and seemed about to say "kill"] kiss you. Ladies and gentlemen, I will win if you caucus for me. Please caucus for me. That may, in the end, not prove to be a winning pitch. But it’s certainly an honest one.
INDIANOLA, Iowa — In the saga of the Republican campaign for Iowa, put Saturday down as the day the affable, folksy preacher finally mustered up some Old Testament-style wrath.
Weeks into a massive Mitt Romney ad blitz targeting Mike Huckabee’s record on taxes, crime and immigration, the former Arkansas governor has started swinging back, just as the caucuses loom. “If a person will become president by being dishonest, then just remember that if he becomes president, he will likely not start being honest in the job,” Huckabee told a packed crowd in a restaurant here. Huckabee accused Romney of lying about his record. Then he accused Romney of lying about John McCain’s record. And then he accused Romney of lying about Rudy Giuliani’s record.
And finally, he said Romney was lying about his own record. “I didn’t just say I was pro-life to get elected,” Huckabee told reporters after his speech to voters. Here, he’s even quibbling with one of the only nice things Romney says about him (Romney ads say they’re both “good men” and “pro-life governors”). “I was consistently pro-life… he’s a recent convert to the pro-life position.”
Before Huckabee’s news conference was even over, spokesman Kevin Madden said Romney had nothing to apologize for. (And no, he and I are not related.) “Mike Huckabee’s record is his record and his alone,” Madden e-mailed me during Huckabee’s presser. “It’s a troubling record, but the facts about it are true and the differences many Republicans have with his positions are very real.”
In a race where many of Huckabee’s supporters say one of the things they like most about him is his refusal to go negative, even in the face of Romney’s ads, though, what does this new tactic mean? Just Friday, Romney put two new ads on the air that Huckabee called the last straw. (I will defer to the Boston braintrust and call them “contrast” commercials instead of attack ads, but they have all the hallmarks of a hit piece; when the federally mandated “I approve this message” comes before the ad, instead of after, it’s because the candidate doesn’t want to take credit for what you’ve just seen.) The sped-up campaign has gotten so complicated on so many different levels that Huckabee defended McCain, against a Romney ad that zings him over illegal immigration. That’s despite the fact that if Huckabee does win Iowa, McCain — now camped out in New Hampshire — is hoping to crush him there. “He’s now attacked John McCain, he’s attacked Rudy Giuliani, he’s attacked everybody,” Huckabee said. “He’s not telling anybody why he should be president, he’s only telling everybody why we shouldn’t be president.”
Of course, it’s one thing to call a rival dishonest in front of a room full of reporters, and it’s another thing to spend limited resources to do it on television 30 seconds at a time. Huckabee and his campaign manager, Ed Rollins (no stranger to negative campaigning himself), both refused to rule out the prospect of a counterpunching ad against Romney. But they said that wasn’t immediately in the works. If Huckabee never directly answers back, that may be mostly a function of crowded airwaves. He says he’s got $2 million in the bank, but there’s not much he can do with it in Iowa. An extremely unscientific study of Des Moines cable channels since Wednesday makes me think the only air time Huckabee could buy to try to savage Romney would come between the infomercials for the Magic Bullet blender system sometime before dawn. (It can go in the microwave and it’s dishwasher- safe.)
More likely, though, Huckabee’s trying to have his “comparison” cake and eat it, too. In his own TV spots, Huckabee plays the sympathy card, telling voters, “If you love negative campaigning, you’ve got to be loving the last few days of this election.” At the same time, he gets headlines blaring “Huck Turns Hulk,” and blog posts like this one, so the media can carry his anti-Romney message to undecided voters for him. Huckabee aides say they don’t know whether Romney’s commercials are cutting into the Arkansan’s support here, but if Saturday is any guide, they’re not taking any chances.
From riots and instability to serious questions about what happens to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, the fallout from Benazir Bhutto’s assassination is already rippling around the world. To listen to Mike Huckabee, though, the real danger posed by the al-Qaida attack on Bhutto could be stopped by… building a fence on the Mexican border.
For the day and a half since Bhutto’s death, Huckabee has been linking the situation in Pakistan to illegal immigration in the U.S., in a rhetorical move that makes more political sense than policy sense. “A lot of Americans sitting in Pella, Iowa, maybe look halfway around the world and say, ‘How does that affect me?’” Huckabee said at a morning press conference at the Pizza Ranch here (where, a sign helpfully informs you, the buffet is not available for takeout). “We need to understand that violence and terror is significant when it happens in Pakistan; it’s more significant when it could happen in our own cities, and it happens if people can slip across our border and we have no control over them.”
Leaving aside the question of whether Iowa voters truly can’t look at the Bhutto murder and see that it’s never a good thing when al-Qaida operatives can kill popular politicians anywhere — let alone in a key U.S. ally with nuclear missiles — Huckabee’s up to something strange here. On Thursday night, he suggested U.S. authorities should step up surveillance of Pakistanis crossing the border. Friday, he claimed 660 Pakistanis had been nabbed by the Border Patrol last year trying to sneak into the country from Mexico. For a governor with little foreign policy experience who wants to be president of a country at war, turning a vexing international crisis into an illegal immigration problem is probably not a bad political pivot.
The problem is, Pakistanis are not flooding the border illegally. Huckabee’s count of 660 appears to be a mistaken total that he arrived at by adding several years’ worth of arrests together. Department of Homeland Security stats say federal immigration cops caught 721 Pakistanis in 2006, but there’s no way to know how many of them were arrested anywhere near Mexico. Probably not many — most experts say as many as 40 percent of the illegal immigrants in the U.S. came here on a legal visa and stayed after it expired, rather than hiring a coyote to haul them through the desert. Official government estimates say there are probably more undocumented Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese and Vietnamese here than Pakistanis, though Huckabee claimed Pakistan was sending an ever-larger share of illegal traffic. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told me a couple of months ago that authorities really weren’t that worried about jihadists coming into the country from the Southwest. And of course (at the risk of making this post a Rudy Giuliani item), the closest the 9/11 hijackers got to Mexico was when some of them lived in southern California, biding their time on student visas or other legal papers.
The idea that a suicide bombing in Pakistan should immediately light a fire under border security efforts leaves me wondering whether Huckabee really understands immigration. He already reversed his position on the issue, once he got within striking distance of Mitt Romney, by discarding his earlier rhetoric about compassion for illegal immigrants in favor of tough talk about preventing amnesty. It only took two weeks of meetings between Huckabee and Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist for Huckabee to come around to the more conservative point of view — after a year in which he and John McCain spent considerable time watching from the wings as their rivals rushed to outdo Tom Tancredo.
Even before then, he tended to use bizarre metaphors when he talked about border security — he once told me that if Wal-Mart can keep track of their Super Saver Center inventory, the government should be able to keep track of who’s coming and going at borders. When Huckabee says, as he often does, that “it ought to be at least as difficult to get across an international border as it is to get on an airplane in our own hometown,” he ignores the fact that the whole problem with illegal immigration is that immigrants manage to avoid any guards who could ask for their documents. (Or make them take their shoes off and deposit their liquids and gels in a tray.) Quick quips like that one have made it possible for Huckabee to gloss over a serious policy problem, one that Congress and the White House have been completely unable to move forward on for two years.
Illegal immigration is the hottest issue for many Iowa Republicans, and given Huckabee’s track record as Arkansas governor — supporting in-state college tuition for some undocumented immigrants there, pushing for Mexico to open a consulate in Little Rock — I can’t blame him for trying to give voters what they want to hear. But isn’t the debate over our borders inflamed enough without would-be presidents saying things like (as Huckabee did Friday morning), “The immigration issue is not so much about people coming to pick lettuce or make beds — it’s about people who could come with a shoulder-fired missile”?
Hillary Clinton arrived here the day after Christmas with a simple message for Iowa caucus-goers: The fun is over, and now it’s time to get serious. The world is a scary place; the economy feels as though it’s ready to collapse, healthcare bills keep going up and up, the country is mired in wars, and the government just doesn’t seem to work right. And that’s only the trouble we knew about Wednesday — as Benazir Bhutto’s assassination on Thursday made starkly clear, unexpected crises cross the president’s desk every day.
“On Jan. 20, 2009, someone will raise his or her hand to take the oath of office in front of our Capitol,” Clinton said as she launched her final bus tour of Iowa. “And then that person will go to the Oval Office. And on the desk in the Oval Office will be a stack of problems.”
That’s what Clinton’s campaign is about now, right down to the clunky official name of the tour, “Big Problems, Real Solutions — Time to Pick a President.” Forget the polls, and the horse race. Forget the flashier rhetoric from the other guys. Forget the tactical differences among the Democratic candidates about how they’d accomplish the policy goals most of them share. Clinton is confronting voters with a much starker question — which candidate can walk into the White House and get right to work fixing the mess we’re in?
Sixteen years later, Bill and Hillary Clinton are reviving the “buy one, get one free” theme of the 1992 election, making their time in the White House into a co-presidency, so the other leading Democrats look like rookies in comparison. Even the failed effort to reform healthcare that Clinton led has become a talking point. “When I went to the White House with Bill, we tackled some very tough problems,” she said Wednesday. “One was trying to get healthcare for every single American. I like to say that problem tackled me back.”
That line notwithstanding, most of the laughs her consultants once hoped would warm her public image are gone. (For that matter, so is most of her earlier talk about making history as the first woman president.) Everything’s weightier now, and the atmosphere at Clinton’s events seems intense even by the standards of the last week of a campaign. Her newest ad, which hit the air as her bus tour began, mixes troubling images with a stirring but somber instrumental soundtrack and no narration. It’s called “Stakes,” and — no surprise — she thinks they’re high.
“You have an awesome responsibility,” she tells Iowa Democrats. “The entire country and even the world will be watching.” She’ll broadcast a two-minute taped message statewide next Wednesday, the night before the caucuses, that hits the same theme. At rallies, where she constantly draws crowds of 200 or more, she leads voters through a recitation of the dangers facing the country, then ticks through her experience, from Little Rock to Washington, solving the same kinds of problems. “We need someone on day one and every day after, to be prepared for all that we know awaits and to be prepared for whatever comes our way,” she said here. “We’ve had seven years of a president who I believe has turned our country backwards.” At this point in the campaign, even the Mount Pleasant high school marching band stayed on message — when they kept the crowd entertained before the rally, they opened with “The Final Countdown.”
If voters don’t get the point from one Clinton, maybe they can get it from her husband. Before breaking off to cover more ground by holding his own rallies, Bill Clinton introduced Hillary in Mount Pleasant Wednesday. “Being president under the best of circumstances is a challenging job,” he said. “All the easy decisions get made by somebody else — that’s what you have help for.” (Still a big draw, the former president had to leave the stage once Hillary started speaking — the people closest to him were paying more attention to getting autographs than to the candidate’s stump speech.) Or from their daughter, Chelsea, who’s also on the trail this week. (“Are you going to caucus for my mom?” Chelsea asked anyone who approached her after rallies.) Or from longtime family friends and political allies, who are touring Iowa this week in clusters the campaign calls “Hill’s Angels” to make the same pitch.
Sen. Barack Obama‘s new stump speech Thursday morning answered Clinton’s experience argument more directly than he has through the entire campaign. “The real gamble in this election is playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expecting a different result,” he said. Obama’s advisors are trying to highlight the flip side of all that experience: If Clinton has been so influential for so long, they say, she deserves some of the blame for the Bush administration’s mistakes — especially the Iraq war, which she voted for.
Obama’s senior strategist, David Axelrod, went even further, telling reporters Thursday that instability in Pakistan was partly due to the United States “taking its eye off the ball” by invading Iraq. “She was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, which we would submit was one of the reasons why we were diverted from Afghanistan, Pakistan and al-Qaida, who may have been players in this event today, so that’s a judgment she’ll have to defend,” Axelrod said after Obama’s speech. (Clinton aides called that line baseless and accused Obama of politicizing a tragedy and a geopolitical crisis.)
That exchange, though, only highlighted how events can move faster than even the smartest strategists. Bhutto’s assassination brings the experience question into sharp relief, right when Clinton was trying to do the same thing. The attack could make caucus-goers think twice about the heavy emphasis on domestic issues over the last few months of the campaign. Her aides won’t say so publicly, but they don’t have to. Just by talking about Bhutto’s death, Clinton reminded audiences Thursday of her foreign travel during her husband’s administration. “I have known Benazir for more than 12 years,” she said Thursday night in Guthrie Center. “She was prime minister when I traveled to Pakistan with Chelsea on behalf of our country to develop better relations and to look for ways that she could cooperate.” Bhutto and Clinton talked about their families, too, she said — implying she’s such an old foreign policy hand that she’s friends with world leaders.
Of course, what won’t be clear until next week is what the voters think of it. Clinton has only a couple of years more in the Senate than Obama or John Edwards, the rivals she’s warning people not to take a chance on. For her supporters, the case is already made. “First ladies — if you believe that they aren’t involved in what’s going on in this country, then just think of your own wife,” said Ron Fedler, the mayor of West Point, Iowa, who’s backing Clinton and came to the Mount Pleasant rally. “Is she involved in what’s going on in your life? Of course she is!”
But political operatives estimate as many as one out of every five caucus-goers might not have made up their minds yet, and for undecided voters, it’s a little more complicated. Some say they can see Clinton’s point, but the argument still hasn’t closed the deal. “I know she could get the job done,” said Nell Duwelius, who’s trying to choose between Clinton, Edwards and Obama. “I hope [Obama] can get the job done.” As Clinton hammers through her résumé line by line, though, she risks leaving the crowd behind, even if she gets the idea across. There’s nothing subtle about her latest theme; from the gigantic American flag backdrops to the plain-spoken rhetoric about plowing through Republican obstacles, Clinton almost seems to be trying to bulldoze voters into her camp. “It’s not terribly inspiring,” Jaclyn Rundle, a management professor at Central College, after listening to Clinton make her case at a rally in Pella. “There’s nothing flashy about it, nothing very elevating.”
Flashy or not, Clinton is making her pitch as clear she can — when something like this happens, she’s the one who knows what to do about it. “The job itself is unpredictable,” she said Wednesday, even before Bhutto was killed. “You never know what may happen in some part of the world that will create a real challenge at home to us here in Iowa.” There’s less than a week for Iowans to weigh whether Clinton is the one they want in charge when faraway calamities like the Bhutto assassination threaten to have repercussions at home.
My arrival on the campaign trail this week for Salon should help solve one of the great mysteries of the last few years — am I kryptonite for presidential campaigns?
Starting in 2002, I covered three would-be presidents of the United States for their hometown papers, working for the Washington bureau of the Gannett chain. Every one of them was near the peak of their political career when I started each beat. None of them was when I finished.
I began following Tom Daschle’s career for the Sioux Falls (S.D.) Argus Leader three months before Republicans swept Senate control away from him. In early 2003, two colleagues and I co-wrote a story reporting that Daschle had told friends and allies that he would run for president — which ran the morning Daschle changed his mind and announced he would stay in the Senate. By the time I stopped writing about South Dakota, Daschle had been knocked out of office by Republican John Thune, the first Senate party leader to lose a reelection campaign since Arizona’s Ernest McFarland in 1952.
Bill Frist came next. As the Washington correspondent for Gannett’s Nashville, Tenn., paper, I joined him on a February 2005 trip to New Hampshire. It was the first stage in what many people expected to be a triumphant Frist campaign for the GOP nomination the following year. But then came the fight over Terri Schiavo’s life, and Frist’s clumsy, long-distance video diagnosis. And the compromise that kept Frist from ending Senate filibusters for judicial nominees, which could have made him a hero to social conservatives. And a scandal over Frist’s sale of stock in the massive hospital chain his family founded. When Frist finally quit the GOP race, former Daschle aides were sure I was cursed and began nervously asking if I would be assigned to cover campaigns they were working for.
For two years after that, I mostly wrote about immigration and border security, and the world of presidential politics carried on, curse free. Then, this past April, I started doing some coverage of John McCain’s campaign for the Arizona Republic — just in time for his fundraising to dry up, his staff to implode, and his standing in the polls to slide from front-runner to bottom feeder. It was all a surprise to some observers, but not to anyone who knew my career path. Sure, McCain is turning things around now, but another reporter picked up most of the coverage of his recovery.
So now here I am, joining Walter Shapiro to roam through Iowa, New Hampshire and other early voting states. The luck I’ve brought candidates can’t last — no matter how muddled the field looks now, someone’s got to win this thing, both for the Democrats and the Republicans. (But I’ll be carefully cross-referencing my travel schedule against sudden slumps by candidates I write about, just in case.) At any rate, I’m glad to be here, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.
