Democracy in Clinton, Iowa, Part VI: The Main Event

VI. Some disclosure is in order. First, Clinton is a predominantly Democratic county. (In 2008, Barack Obama received 15,018 votes there, or 61 percent. In 2004, John Kerry received 13,813 votes, which was 56 percent.) Secondly, as any search of my name will reveal, I spent several years working for Democrats, and I’m also a carrier of the Scarlet O, having worked field for Obama in Iowa during the 2007 primary. These factors mean, respectively, that there was a) less likely to be substantial Republican campaign activity in Clinton County than in other parts of the state, and b) whatever existed would be harder for me, personally, to find, seeing as, despite my (sincere) interest in producing non-partisan work, I was still associated with the other team.

That said, I was in Clinton for 31 days, and I went the first 30 without seeing a single physical manifestation of any Republican presidential campaign (unless we count my interview with Ron Paul supporter Gary Galant). On my last day there, I saw my first two presidential yard signs (both for Paul). Rick Santorum and Herman Cain had made stops in Clinton earlier in the year, and Paul came for a well-attended address a week before I arrived, but no other candidates showed up. There were no campaign offices to be found, and no canvassers walking the streets. The local NBC, ABC, and CBS affiliates all informed me that they had yet to sell any political ads.

Jon Huntsman elected to skip Iowa and focus on New Hampshire, as did Buddy Roemer and Gary Johnson, the two Republican candidates who have received virtually zero attention from the national press. Mitt Romney decided to approach Iowa cautiously, seeing as his straw poll victory in 2007 hadn’t meant anything (Mike Huckabee won the caucus, and Romney skipped the straw poll this time around), but he wasn’t writing it off entirely, and after a two month break, he started campaigning there again in mid-October. Plus, there were still six Republican upstarts for whom an Iowa victory would be significant. And although there weren’t as many Republican caucus-goers in Clinton County as in other parts of Iowa, a well-developed primary campaign wouldn’t turn its back on thousands of potential votes.

I first took a look at the GOP candidates’ websites on September 16, and it was immediately clear how undeveloped their campaign operations remained. At that time, the caucuses were four months and ten days away. In the world of presidential campaigns, that’s not a lot of time. (When I showed up in Iowa with just over 90 days to go in 2007, the leading Democrats already had a significant staff, offices throughout the state, and were coordinating expansive volunteer operations.)

But besides not listing offices and staffers (as Dan Balz of the Washington Post recently noted, they weren’t listed because in many cases they don’t exist), the websites of the current crop of Republican challengers weren’t effectively designed to facilitate volunteer activity. Romney’s page allowed me to create a “MyMitt” account, which I did using my Clinton address. Logging in brought me to a page that listed my congressional district as “0”, with no apparent way to change it. (It still was, on November 16th.) Only one volunteer action was presented to me: fundraising. Perry’s page was even more inaccessible. The main site had five links, none of them related to volunteering. A small “Contact Us” link at the bottom of the page took me to a form that could be filled out, with “volunteering” as an option. The sites for Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann, and Jon Huntsman permitted visitors to sign up to be a volunteer, but offered no campaign activities that supporters could engage in, with the exception of online ones like Facebooking and Tweeting. (It’s important to remember that for years, technology has existed that has allowed individuals to take actions from home, like calling likely supporters or pulling down lists of voters in a specific neighborhood to contact. While several of the campaigns are doing this now, none of it was available on the Republican sites in September.)

The sites for Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich were the most likely to foster grassroots activity. Gingrich’s listed a host of volunteer activities that supporters could engage in. They weren’t ones that the campaign could coordinate, instead being things like hosting debate watch parties, writing letters to the editor of local newspapers, and downloading fact-sheets to distribute to others, but at least there was something that a Gingrich supporter could do immediately besides donate money (all of the sites allowed for donations).

Cain’s site contained glaring errors – as of late October, a visitor could still sign up to vote for Cain at the straw poll of August 13th – but it also included a rudimentary online community which enabled supporters to register and connect with one another. That community page was visually unappealing and hard to use – for example, there was no way to sort a list of national volunteer events by your location – but again, at least it was something.

People who possess the initiative to visit a website and sign up to volunteer are invaluable to a field operation. Campaign field staffers spend hours every day churning through lists of possible supporters in the hopes of finding a few folks willing to get involved, and so when someone effectively walks in the front door and asks to help, any campaign with a ground game worth mentioning will be all over them.

In order to test the campaigns’ responsiveness, I signed up to be a volunteer with all of them on that first day (9/16). Twelve days later, I received my first contact, a form email from Zac Moffat, Mitt Romney’s “Digital Director,” claiming that “In the coming days and weeks we’ll be rolling out additional volunteer opportunities…” The email noted that if I wanted “to get involved locally,” I should contact Phil Valenziano and provided an Iowa phone number to call, but that led to an answering machine at “Romney for Iowa campaign headquarters.” This was followed in early October by a call from a staffer named Luke who identified himself as a field director for the state. The Romney campaign was trying to find people to make phone calls from their home computer, which was done on October 15th. I am under the impression that it was the first state-wide volunteer activity the campaign had attempted. (I wish I could confirm this, but I played email-tag with Romney’s Iowa press secretary, Sara Craig, before she stopped responding to my interview requests.)

Revealingly, I didn’t receive a volunteer-oriented phone call from any other campaign staffer. I got many emails, but they were almost exclusively of the fundraising and message-dissemination variety. During October, Michelle Bachmann conducted multiple national conference calls that supporters could dial into, but the first Bachmann email to mention volunteering in Iowa that I received was sent on November 8th. (Bachmann’s Iowa State Director, Eric Woolson, emailed me on November 6th about setting up an interview, but he didn’t respond to my subsequent messages.) Signing up that first time yielded no volunteer contacts from Rick Perry, but after I signed up a second time on October 26th, a staffer named Mike Thom (the self-identified Field Director for Iowa), contacted me claiming that “There are plenty of opportunities to volunteer with the campaign.” I wrote him back saying I was a reporter and requesting more information, and he directed me to Matt Gronewald, the State Director, who didn’t respond to my email.Rick Santorum’s campaign has sent me about a dozen emails since mid-September, and no one responded to messages I left asking for an interview. Ron Paul’s Iowa director, Michael Heath, agreed to talk to me, but then was over-ruled by the national campaign. He regretfully told me that I would have to reach out to James Barcia, the national press secretary. While Barcia didn’t return my emails, I was at least able to speak with a state campaign chair named Drew Ivers who directed me to volunteers like Gary Galant and Dennis Green. (When I spoke with him during the second half of October, Green told me that he had recently been to a volunteer meeting that drew around 10 attendees. Also, in mid-November, I received a phone call from a volunteer at an office in Ankeny which she said was the state’s volunteer headquarters. She was confirming that I lived in Clinton so that I could be encouraged to caucus for Paul. She said that between 20 and 25 people were at that moment in the office, calling people who had voted for Paul in the August straw pole, and added that canvassing and phone calls were targeting voters around the state.) Newt Gingrich’s campaign held a volunteer conference call on October 27th (seemingly its first), but the emphasis at that time was still on things people could do on their own, such as hosting debate watch parties. (The campaign seemed confident that the debates were Newt’s best recruitment tool.) I would have liked to learn more about what the campaign said was the “lean” effort they were running, but press secretary R.C. Hammond didn’t respond to my emails.

Which brings us to Herman Cain. As I mentioned earlier, Cain’s campaign had offered a rudimentary online community that people could join. This was something the other campaigns (with the exception of Buddy Roemer, whose online Iowa group still lists only three members as of this writing) were not doing in October. It was by messaging the Iowa for Cain group that I was connected with Lisa Lockwood, who identified herself as the Communications Director for the state. She, in turn, connected me with Steve Hensler, 22, the Iowa Phone Bank Director. Cain had (and still has, to my knowledge) only one office in the state, located in Urbandale, a suburb of Des Moines. However, supporters could make phone calls using the online tools previously mentioned, which was an effort Hensler was coordinating. Hensler was one of only four paid staffers in the state. He told me that he caught the “campaign bug” during Steve Forbes’ run for president in 2000, when he was 12. (“Got the bug young.”) He said he had done political work in Wisconsin and Iowa, and had been with the Cain campaign since July.Hensler focused on the online activity of Cain’s effort, which he described as being “very grass rootsy” and working “brilliantly.” This included HermanCain.com, where the online community I joined was located, the Herman Cain Express, a second, slicker online community which had been built to replace the original one (it’s still pretty rough, in my humble opinion), and Youth for Cain, a Facebook groupdesigned to find high school supporters, including 100 leaders. “This is a campaign of the people, for the people,” Hensler said. “It’s not going to be by a bunch of paid staffers. It’s going to be by the people, cause that’s the way our country was originally intended.”Hensler was portraying a decentralized effort that was rapidly spawning new groups of Cain activists around the state and nation. He said, for example, that supporters were calling voters in Iowa from states throughout the country, and that he was “getting bombarded” with volunteers around the nation. I tried to get some specifics. I asked how many people were making calls. “Well, I choose to keep that number very close to my chest,” Hensler said. “It’s a sufficient amount. You can believe that. It keeps me working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.” The Youth for Cain Facebook page, which Hensler claimed was a new effort hoping to find 100 high school leaders around the state, had been liked by 31 people. “Not too darn bad,” Hensler said. (I did high school outreach for Obama in Iowa during 2007, and our goal was to find 1,500 students who would caucus for him.) I asked about how many active volunteers were in Iowa, and he told me to take note of the Cain for Iowa online community, the biggest one around, which as of early November had 675 members. (It had 753 when last I checked in the second week of November.) I asked how many of those people had taken an action besides signing up. “I’m not going to tell you any numbers,” Hensler said. He told me that “90 percent” of Iowa’s counties had at least one active volunteer, and that an effort was underway to recruit caucus leaders for precincts throughout in the state. On that front, the campaign had a nightly goal “to be able to obtain victory, and we have been achieving or overachieving our goals every night for the past few weeks.””I’m a guy who thinks that to win the chess game – I was a chess player – the best way to win chess it to make your enemy, your opponent, think like he’s winning,” Hensler told me. “So you don’t want to show him what you have. Let him come to you arrogantly [thinking he can] just wipe you off the board, and then you win. Kind of like the tortoise and the hare strategy. That’s the approach I’ve taken through many campaigns. I’m very tight lipped about the progress I make. I like to keep people wondering. I’ll tell you right now, though, we are moving faster than a bullet, I’d say.”

Hensler came across like a genuinely nice guy who would be fun to hang out with. He wished me luck with my article several times, inquired as to the economic viability of freelance journalism, and then asked how much I expected to be paid if it ran somewhere. “Throw me a number,” he said.

Lisa Lockwood, the Communications Director, was also friendly, and setting up our interview was easy. Unfortunately, when we spoke in mid-October, she didn’t seem particularly familiar with the campaign she spoke for.

“The difference between this campaign and other campaigns is that it’s growing from the ground up,” Lockwood told me, which, if we’re honest, is what every campaign says. “People are coming in our doors, people are giving us calls.” I asked for numbers. Lockwood didn’t know how many active volunteers there were. She told me that Hensler had said that Cain was “getting 53 percent of known supporters of other campaigns,” but admitted that she didn’t know what that meant. She said there was a great deal of independent volunteer activity on Facebook, but she wasn’t familiar with how many groups existed.

I asked why she supported Cain, and she said he was “just super personable, very approachable,” as well as being “funny” and “a unique and wonderful human being.” She continued: “I got the sense from him, and he’s certainly proved it to be true, that he’s not going to be one to get down in the mud. He’s above the fray, and he’s going to stay that way. I loved that he was not a politician.” She also pointed out that he had saved Godfather’s Pizza from bankruptcy, experience that would help him as president. “In the business world, you’re in it for a profit. I think in the world of government, you’re not in it for a profit, but let’s at least not go into debt.”

We moved on to the issues, and I asked her to explain Cain’s recent admission on Meet the Press that under his 9-9-9 tax plan, some people would pay higher taxes. “Boy, you’re asking the wrong person that question,” Lockwood said. “I pay somebody to do my taxes and they’re not that complicated.”

“I think,” she said, “there probably are scenarios under which some people’s taxes would go up, and I don’t know what those scenarios would be specifically, but I do think that there’s far, far, far, more benefit than there is detriment.”

I asked about Cain’s comment that his lack of familiarity with foreign leaders was irrelevant, seeing as it had nothing to do with jobs in America. “I haven’t heard anybody be worried about that at all,” Lockwood said, speaking (I think) for Cain supporters. “Not a concern at all among anybody I’ve spoken with. We’ve got too much to deal with at home before we start dealing with what’s going on in other places.” Should the importance of foreign policy be downplayed? “That would be my position. I don’t know that that’s an official campaign position.” I asked if there was a correlation between expenditures overseas, such as military activity, and the national economy. “I am not a foreign policy expert either,” Lockwood began, “and I never worked so hard in my life – the first C I ever got in my life was in college economics. I’m sure there is a correlation. The whole budget is tied together. What that correlation might be, I couldn’t begin to tell you. I do believe that the government, one of its top priorities is to make sure our nation is secure.”

Lockwood noted that government “needs to get out of the way of job creation, and encourage business growth by making sure that taxes are not prohibitive to job creation and growth.” I asked for an example of onerous regulations hurting Iowa business. “Um, off the top of my head, I’m looking at a map and trying to think,” Lockwood said. “Well, this is not a real recent example, but it was a huge loss for the state of Iowa when Gateway computers that were originally created and headquartered here moved across the border.” Did they do that for tax reasons? “Yeah.” When did that happen? “I don’t remember when that happened.” (The late 80s, as far as I can discern, though the company later returned.)

I asked if subsidies for Iowa farmers represented an unwarranted government intrusion into the working of the free market. “Well, I think that’s a totally mixed bag of answers in that question,” Lockwood began. “Even among farmers who get the subsidies there’s mixed feelings. That’s a real hot-button issue here in Iowa.” Did the campaign have a position? “I don’t know if there’s an official position on subsidies in particular.” That was the last question I was able to ask before Lockwood had to go. She was scheduled to call a radio station for another interview.

And then there was Obama 2012, the return of the undisputed heavyweight champion of the political world in 2008, emerging from the election with a 13 million person email list, 66.9 million supporters at the polls, and the good will of twice as many voters age 18-29 as the other guys. In October, the campaign was principally (and almost exclusively) represented in Clinton County by Bryant Gilbert, 23, a full-time volunteer in addition to holding down his day job as a chemical engineer. He was also a former Obama Summer Fellow, where he was provided a crash course in the art of political organizing before being sent off with a list of 180 past volunteers and supporters from the area to call and ask if they were ready to join hands and charge into the breach once more. (I tried to confirm this number, but Pardee wasn’t able to generate a list of former volunteers using the state party’s database to which she had access as a county Party chair.) Gibert spoke with me about his task, which was to “reassemble the same movement” that existed in Clinton last time around, as well as to encourage Obama supporters to turn out and caucus. After I interviewed him, I moved on to OFA’s Iowa press office, where spokesman John Kraus agreed to speak with me on background only. (I went up and back with him about this, but I wasn’t able to get a straight answer about why an on-the-record interview wasn’t an option.) Regardless, I was told the following about Obama’s efforts in Iowa: that it had never stopped after November, 2008. Instead, work had been done for years to keep citizens engaged with the Administration’s agenda, advocating it to one another and to their elected representatives, as well as campaigning for local and state-level Democratic candidates. There were currently 8 campaign offices open in Iowa with more to come, and over the summer, 77 members of the Fellows program (like Gilbert) had been trained to get the re-election efforts up and running in their respective communities. (Another fall class was already in session). Outreach to college students was also underway. I was hoping to quantify the work Organizing for America had done over the last few years in Clinton specifically and Iowa more broadly, but Kraus was only able or willing to share the following statistical information, which he provided in an email:

“Since the launch of the re-election campaign in April, OFA Iowa staff and volunteers have held over 700 trainings, planning sessions, house parties, and phone banks. OFA Iowa volunteers have made over 170,000 calls to supporters and held over 2,000 one-on-one conversations.” (Note: One-on-ones means an organizer meeting in person with a potential volunteer.)

Toward the end of October, I attended the first OFA gathering in Clinton County. It was scheduled for a Saturday, and Gilbert had hoped that 10 or 15 supporters would show up, but the actual number was 9, including 7 seniors, one middle-aged woman, and one young man who was somebody else’s grandson. All seemed to be enthusiastic supporters, and the two I had a chance to interview said that they intended to volunteer for the re-election effort. I like to have recorded the content of the meeting, but I was politely told by the regional OFA staffer who led it, Tom Geraci, that it was off-the-record.