Jimmy Carter hace campaña en casa de Jim Albright en Cedar Rapids, Iowa, el 8 de enero de 1976. Los carteles recuerdan a sus seguidores la fecha del caucus demócrata: el 19 de enero. (Foto The Gazette).
Jules Witcover nos relata el caucus demócrata de Iowa de 1976 en uno de los capítulos de su libro Marathon: the pursuit of the Presidency, 1972-1976:
Jody Powell recalled flying back to Atlanta with Jimmy Carter after that first Iowa trip in early 1975 and reading a front-page report by Jim Flansburg in the Des Moines Register. Flansburg was impressed with Carter, and said so in print. Noting Carter's flat-out promise that he would "never tell a lie," Flansburg wrote: "If there weren't believers, there were certainly those who were persuaded on the basis of one speech to seriously consider the candidacy of Carter. Indeed, seldom has a candidate without a fabled name made such a fast and favorable impression on Iowans." Powell showed the story to Carter and the two talked about Iowa's potential, and the good reception he had just received. "We were looking for a place to go in the caucus states," Powell said. "We were seeing if we could find a place to surprise before New Hampshire, and the people of Iowa seemed to be our kind of folks. Once we became convinced we had a good shot, Iowa became the place."
Powell quickly seized upon the importance of local coverage in the Carter kind of campaign. "At that point, the Des Moines Register became more important than The Washington Post, " he said later. "The only coverage you get at that stage is local. We might not have known much about anything else, but we did know local media." So while other candidates may have fretted about a lack of national coverage, Powell realized that the large Democratic field in 1975-76 would dilute national coverage for everyone. "Where we were perceptive," he said, "was we knew not only that we couldn't get you [the national press] but the others couldn't get you either." This was one reason it was decided that headquarters could remain in Atlanta rather than being moved up to an expensive Washington office. "With Ted Kennedy out, a lot of things would start tumbling," Powell said. "The field would be bunched up and nobody would break out of this pack in 1975. We didn't need a big Washington office; nobody could afford to cover it so nobody would get a jump."
The Iowans' response to Carter's first foray was a bit of a surprise to the candidate and his press aide. Several weeks before, Hamilton Jordan had phoned Democratic State Chairman Tom Whitney, and Whitney told him, according to Jordan: "You really ought to forget about Iowa. It's not your kind of state." But it was not Jimmy Carter's nature to forget any state. "We realized from the outset," said Jordan much later, "that what we were going to do was very unconventional—a man running for office who had no forum, who was not an incumbent, who was not from the traditional breeding ground of American politics, who was a Southerner. We were going to have to prove ourselves early, and the early primaries and even the caucuses were going to have a disproportionate amount of influence in the media." This approach made sense for another reason: it fit right in with the way Carter did things. "Jimmy's nature is to run a total effort everywhere," Jordan went on. "When he ran for governor in '66 and lost, and then decided to run in '70, a lot of people, myself included, tried to [dissuade him and] talk him into running for lieutenant-governor or commissioner of agriculture. I went over to see him in '67 or '68 and I said, 'Jimmy, you should be the governor, but you know, this guy Carl Sanders just can't be defeated.' And he told me in his living room, 'If I don't get but two votes, mine and yours, I'm going to run for governor.' He made that same kind of total commitment to the presidential campaign. And that kind of commitment does not allow you to say, 'Well, we may not run in these ten or fifteen states. . . .'
"I felt like there was going to be an overreaction to the new rules of the Democratic Party, that people were going to pick and choose, to shape strategies that presumed a brokered convention. We shaped a strategy that presumed there was not going to be a brokered convention. We felt like other candidates, particularly the ones who had duties and responsibilities in Washington, were going to have to say, 'Well, there are fifty states; we're going to focus on these twenty.' Because Jimmy was a tremendous, full-time campaigner, we could spend a little time on the states they had written off and do well there, plus also contest them for their priority states. I never remember a meeting where it was even discussed which states we were going to run in and which states we were going to skip. Circumstances dictated that we were going to run every where."
A great irony about the Carter strategy is that it was essentially the same one that Ed Muskie had used in 1972, and that had helped to bring him down. But there were at least two notable differences: Carter had much greater determination and a stronger affinity for campaigning, and he did so in an atmosphere of low expectations. He was neither discouraged by small crowds and long hours nor was early public indifference particularly bad for him. Muskie had acted as if he were already the party's nominee and a great deal was expected of him; Jimmy Carter ran as the longest of long shots, and whatever favorable reaction he generated was gravy.
Over the next eleven months Carter returned to Iowa seven times. Tim Kraft, a New Mexico party organizer and state committee official whom Carter had met and recruited during the 1974 congressional campaign, was made the campaign's Plains states coordinator, and he advanced several of the trips. Each time, he became more convinced that Iowa was a golden opportunity. Jordan and he began scouting around for somebody who could take on the state full time, and when no one else could be found, Kraft agreed to do it himself. "We felt the sequence of the primaries and the new federal-election law would make winners out of some candidates and losers out of others," Jordan said, "and candidate attrition would take place very early." But little time was wasted on speculation. "There are things in a political campaign you can control and things you can't. You can't control issues and events and who your opponents are, or what they do or what they say about you. The things you can control are your own organization, your own fund-raising. Because of Jimmy's commitment to the thing we never spent a lot of psychic energy worrying about who we were ultimately going to face."
So, while other candidates and prospective candidates concentrated most of their pre-election year energies on minor liberal skirmishes in the East or on New Hampshire, Carter zeroed in early on Iowa. He combined an easy, warm, personal style with an icy, resolute determination, a kind of soft-sell evangelism that won adherents across the ideological spectrum. There was almost a hypnotic quality to his stump technique. He spoke very softly, in a rush of words that obliged his audiences to listen closely. In all he said, he punctuated his remarks with frequent ingratiating smiles and expressions of affection. The word "love," awkward coming from the mouth of the commonplace politician, was used by Carter as if it were a natural neighborly embrace, with baffling effect. "I want a government," he would intone to his rapt audiences in a quiet, deliberate cadence, "that is as good, and honest, and decent, and truthful, and fair, and competent, and idealistic, and compassionate, and as filled with love as are the American people." He recited this sequence almost as if it were his personal rosary, and, in crowd after crowd, it worked. Then, having given the assembled this layman's benediction, he would descend among them, smiling benignly, this peanut-farmer Billy Graham, and put his hands upon them, and in the process commit them thoroughly. From these personal political baptisms came a small army of dedicated supporters who defied ideological classification, united in their conviction that "Jimmy"—everybody called him that —would restore harmony, and peace, and honesty, and decency, and compassion, and, yes, love, to government.
In August 1975, five months before the Iowa voting, Tim Kraft decided he should move full time into the state. He discussed Iowa's importance again with Jordan, who agreed but asked him to write a strong memo that Jordan could use to win support from others in Atlanta for the necessary resources. "Build yourself a case," Jordan told him. In the memo, dated August 28, 1975, Kraft wrote: "It is past time that we began to devote to Iowa the money and manpower that that crucial state requires. You are aware of the media/political significance of Iowa's January 19 precinct caucuses. . . . JC has indicated very strongly that he does not want to finish second to any candidate. We'd better get going. . . . We'll solicit money but it [the Iowa campaign] can't pay for itself. Money can't buy the kind of press we'll get if JC finishes first in the precinct caucuses. ... [It has been argued] that there are only X amount of materials for fifty states and, accordingly, they must be rationed. Set up a priority, then, and ration Montana, Vermont, or somewhere else. But don't tell me that Iowa, Oklahoma [also an early caucus state], New Hampshire, and Florida should be treated like any of the other forty-six states."
Kraft's memo did the trick, and by Labor Day of 1975 he was living in Iowa, implementing the campaign plan.
A short, mustachioed fellow with the look of a cocky desperado about him, Kraft had helped engineer the election of New Mexico's Governor Jerry Apodaca, and he knew the business of grass-roots organizing. He too had been won over by Carter's political evangelism. Carter dealt with Kraft, as he did with most others, on an intensively personal level: that was a big part of his effectiveness; he would listen long, no matter who was talking to him, important politician or crackpot on the street. That was an almost missionary quality: no soul was not worth saving, nor beyond redemption, if only Carter persisted. And so persist he did, almost with a vengeance and, beyond that, with an unshakable conviction of right. "As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep. And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd." (John 10: 15-16).
Carter's opponents in Iowa soon found that the Good Shepherd was going to be'no pushover. Kraft worked the state like a local precinct, visiting 110 cities and towns between Carter's own visits, which were marked not only by speaking engagements but casual drop-bys in the middle of nowhere. He would call on a farmer in the morning, talk for a while, stay for lunch, then come by again a few weeks later. If the farmer wasn't home, he would leave a handwritten note pinned to the front door that said: "Just dropped by to say hello. Jimmy." Many such visits were followed by telephone calls or notes of thanks. And as Carter and his wife and children pursued this retail campaigning, Kraft shrewdly studied the state caucus machinery.
At the summer's end, an opportunity presented itself that was in a sense the first tangible Carter triumph, and first solid evidence of his diligent thoroughness. Iowa is gifted with one of the most progressive and professional Democratic Party organizations in the country. The state's Democrats have always prided themselves in being in the forefront of reform, and in Tom Whitney they had a young and ambitious chairman who saw the potential for national attention in the 1976 political calendar. Well in advance of the first precinct caucuses of 1976, scheduled for January 19, Whitney and his committee laid plans for delegate selection in accordance with the new and complex national party rules. So complex were they, in fact, that dry-run caucuses were scheduled around the state to familiarize Democrats with the system and to encourage participation. It was decided that it would be good publicity to conduct a straw poll on presidential preferences in conjunction with these practice caucuses. Kraft, seizing on this development, quietly but efficiently mobilized his growing forces to generate a show of strength for Carter that would be noticed by the national press—and, he hoped, by the nation's public as well, far in advance of the New Hampshire primary.
"I worked in a white heat just to get a steering committee named by that time," Kraft recalled later. "I sent out a mailing of six hundred or seven hundred county leaders in the party and came up with a list of nineteen fairly impressive people on a state steering committee." He put out a press release, but the Des Moines Register buried the story. It was important, however, that Democrats around the state hear about the names Carter had corralled before they attended the dry-run caucuses. They included James Schaben, the unsuccessful 1974 gubernatorial nominee; Edris (Soapy) Owens, retired state president of the United Auto Workers; and James Maloney, auditor of Polk County (Des Moines). So Kraft alerted all the steering committee members to attend their own precinct meetings, spread the word, and vote for Carter in the straw poll. There wasn't much to pull together, but at this earliest stage it was enough. Carter polled 9.9 per cent of 5762 persons voting—more than any other active candidate achieved. Shriver was second with 8.7 per cent and Bayh third with 8.1 per cent. About 34 per cent said they were uncommitted.
It was by all odds an insignificant gauge of over-all Democratic strength in Iowa, but it was the only show in town—the only hard bit of political information looking to the 1976 Democratic race available for the press and television to latch on to, and it made news in Iowa, especially because the "winner" was an obscure one-term former governor from a Deep South state who had no business making any splash at all there. As the other candidates moved into Iowa—former Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris, Arizona Congressman Mo Udall, Washington Senator Henry Jackson, then Indiana Senator Birch Bayh and 1972 vice presidential nominee Sargent Shriver—they seldom found a place where the velvet pitch of Jimmy Carter had not been heard or conveyed by proxy by his growing legion of workers. Iowa had the makings of a trap, but it was not one easily resisted, because along with the Carter invasion came, eventually, the media invasion as well, offering a prize no 1976 hopeful could resist.
The media's seizing upon Iowa, though it chose only 47 of 3008 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, was both understandable and defensible. In 1972 the rise of George McGovern's barely detected grassroots efforts at the precinct level had been overlooked for a considerable time by the major newspapers and the television networks; their focus was squarely on Muskie as he collected big-name endorsements en route, nearly everyone thought, to a routine first-ballot nomination. Not even McGovern's show of strength in Iowa shook that perception, and only in retrospect was it realized that something significant had been building for McGovern out in the country. Through the early going, he was mired among the also-rans in the Gallup and other public-opinion polls, not moving up until his primary campaign successes. For their romance with Muskie, the press and television paid heavy alimony after 1972 in terms of their reputation for clairvoyance, let alone clear thinking and assessment of evidence at hand. Some reporters, to their credit, had recognized and chronicled early the Muskie slide and McGovern climb, but this time around, in 1976, if there were going to be early signals, the fourth estate was going to be on the scene en masse to catch them.
The Iowa straw poll had sneaked up on most of the press, but it had served to alert most political reporters of the state's importance as an early line on the 1976 contenders. The next important event did not go unnoticed.
In late October the state Democratic Party held a large Jefferson-Jackson Day fund-raising affair at Iowa State University in Ames, just north of Des Moines, to which all the prospective presidential candidates were invited. The affair had all the trappings of a political convention, with booths set up at .the back of the arena for each of the hopefuls, and time set aside before and after each speech for the candidates themselves to man the booths, shake hands, and answer questions. Kraft drew an early bead on this affair too. The Des Moines Register and Tribune had decided to poll all those who attended the dinner and Kraft did his best to pack the hall. The other candidates' staffs either failed to grasp the psychological impact promised by the poll or could not get supporters out in sufficient numbers. The Harris campaign, for instance, observing that its backers were among the common folk and could not afford the price of admission, made only a modest effort. Bayh's forces depended on labor to come through for them and were disappointed. The result was predictable—a clear-cut victory for Carter, with 23 per cent of 1094 respondents, for the largest share.
Tim Kraft's effort had been audacious and thorough. He had sent out three memos to all Carter workers, friends, and supporters advising them of the showcase opportunity the dinner presented, and the plans for a poll. Pick-up points for the trip to Ames were arranged and information about bus and car transportation dispensed. Though the dinner was expensive— $50 a couple—Tom Whitney confided to Kraft that Democrats would be admitted to balcony seats for $2 apiece. Kraft, in a memo, passed the word that the two bucks "gets you everything but the chicken dinner." And he suggested that "one probably could drift down from the balcony onto the floor and vote" in the poll. (This guerrilla tactic was foiled initially when the Register distributed the ballots at the door to full-paying guests, but some of the Carter two-dollar types infiltrated anyway, slipping down to the floor and appropriating ballots along with box suppers of fried chicken. Nothing was left to chance. In the same memo to Carter supporters, Kraft wrote: "Have the bumper sticker on whatever you drive to Ames; slap it on the chartered bus if need be. There's usually a reporter who polls the parking lot and throws in a sentence about it. Bring whatever extras you have; we may need them for the [straw] hats.") At the auditorium, Rosalynn Carter went into the balcony handing out oversized Carter buttons to people in the first rows, an easy focus for the television cameras. She and Neil Hamilton, an Iowa State student on the steering committee, "must have put on three hundred of these buttons, all in the front row," Kraft recalled. "We knew the thing was going to be covered. Politics is theater. We planned for that."
All of America's major newspapers immediately perceived this first solid sign of Carter's strength in Iowa. In The New York Times, for example, political writer R. W. (Johnny) Apple, Jr., wrote that Carter "appears to have taken a surprising but solid lead" in Iowa's delegate race. "Whether he can maintain his early lead here when the contest switches from opinion leaders to rank-and-file voters is unclear," he went on, but "what is evident is that Mr. Carter, working from Atlanta rather than Washington, has made dramatic progress while attention was focused on the scramble for liberal primacy" among Udall, Bayh, Harris, and Shriver. Nearly three months before the first caucuses of 1976, Carter had grabbed the media spotlight. In one sense, it was what he and his campaign had labored for in obscurity for three years. But some feared it had come too soon. "It was not an unmixed blessing," Jody Powell said later. "It tipped our hand. We never had a chance to surprise anyone after that." The Ames poll did in fact establish Carter as the man to watch, and in that sense raised expectations about him, raising at the same time the level of performance he would have to achieve in the January precinct-voting to impress the media. Impress the media: that was the name of the game now, and some people— chiefly those who were having trouble doing so—didn't like it.
When the press and the networks began to descend on Des Moines right after New Year's Day, one lament was heard repeatedly: Iowa, it went, was no more than a "media event"—the overblowing of an insignificant early phase of the delegate-selection process, for the purpose of satisfying the need for hard news after all the months of vapid preliminaries. Iowans themselves weren't excited about the whole business—barely 11 per cent of the state's Democrats eventually participated in the caucus—but the national media elevated the caucuses to a bogus extravaganza. So said the complainers. One unhappy Udall worker later stated in The Washington Post that the candidates themselves and the issues were lost in the efforts to draw press attention, and in the reporters' determination to draw significance, from an insignificant exercise. "The reality of a presidential campaign," he wrote in a woeful misunderstanding of the dynamics of the system, "is the delegate count, but no significant number of delegates will be selected until March" (in the Massachusetts primary, presumably). The fact is that the reality in the early going of a presidential campaign is not the delegate-count at all. The reality at the beginning stage is the psychological impact of the results—the perception by press, public, and contending politicians of what has happened. Because the candidates themselves act on that perception—adjusting their campaigns to meet criticisms about perceived shortcomings—the perception becomes the reality. Hamilton Jordan and his associates grasped this truth early and acted on it repeatedly.
The performances and reactions of the four most important candidates in the Iowa caucuses—Carter, Bayh, Harris, and Udall—attest to this point. Going into the caucuses, Carter had already moved from being a surprisingly strong prospect to the odds-on favorite who had to win or be judged to have peaked and slipped. Reporters did not pull this viewpoint out of a hat, as their critics were wont to suggest. Tom Whitney, who presided over the caucus process with admirable neutrality, drew the same conclusion in advance of the voting. "If Carter doesn't win here," he told me in his Des Moines headquarters, "there isn't any other thing you can judge than that there has been some slippage. Carter can't finish lower than second or he's finished." And then he added, "The press will write that, and some will write that he should have finished higher."
Within his Washington headquarters, a debate raged over whether Mo Udall should be in Iowa at all—a debate that was to have tremendous ramifications for the whole Udall campaign. Almost from the outset, Udall's first campaign manager, John Gabusi, a veteran congressional staff aide, had discouraged Udall's entry into Iowa. When others argued that the press in 1976 was going to make Iowa the "new New Hampshire," Gabusi countered that no matter what the media said or did, the New Hampshire primary would still be the first real election, and hence would retain its importance. Through early 1975 Udall's campaign had sent organizers first into New Hampshire, then into Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and California, but not into Iowa. Rick Stearns, who had been McGovern's chief delegate-counter in 1972, conferred with Gabusi and contended that if Udall were to go into Iowa at all, he would have do so in the spring of 1975 to be effective. Gabusi agreed, and so Iowa was virtually ignored through the summer.
For personal reasons, Gabusi left the campaign in the end of September. He recommended that Jack Quinn, a young political aide, be made political director and that Stewart Udall ("Stewdall," in the campaign's jargon, in contrast with "Modall"), who was nominally the campaign chairman, take a more active role, rather than simply being a private counselor to his brother. But Stew Udall did not take hold, and Quinn moved into the breach.
The argument resurfaced about Iowa. Quinn agreed that the Iowa precinct caucuses in mid-January would steal a march on the New Hampshire primary as the opening round in the liberal elimination contest, and he sent three field organizers into the state to work with two experienced Iowans, Norma Matthews and Cliff Larsen, a former state chairman.
A few weeks after the Ames dinner, another more general poll by the Des Moines Register and Tribune underscored the fact that Udall still was an unknown in Iowa. Quinn was concerned. He dispatched Stearns and Ken Bode, a young veteran of liberal Democratic wars who was soon to become a writer for The New Republic, to Iowa in late November to take a fresh reading. They returned split in their assessment: Stearns still believed it was too late to do much; Bode argued, in a long memo, that "the state is up for grabs," and urged a step-up in both radio and television commercials and Mo Udall's presence in the state. "Iowa justifies the expense," he wrote. "It will be covered like the first primary always has been in the national press. If we can emerge as the clear liberal choice in Iowa, the payoffs in New Hampshire will be enormous."
Other important figures in the campaign—Stew Udall and Terry Bracy, one of Mo Udall's congressional aides—openly disagreed with the plan to compete in Iowa. They said it made no sense to plunge in so late, just because others, like Bayh, were going in, and particularly made no sense to use expensive media and costly candidate travel—both wholesale political devices—in a retail political situation, which the precinct caucuses indisputably were. Getting people to the polls was fairly simple, and could be done with radio and television appeals; getting them to spend a night at some neighbor's home for actual discussion of a candidate's merits was quite another matter.
The fight grew more heated between Quinn on one side and Stew Udall and Bracy on the other. Memos were fired back and forth, usually via the candidate himself, into December. Quinn wrote to the candidate: "What can we hope to get in Iowa? Realistically, I think we keep the field muddled, as our floor operation did at the NDC. We force up the stakes in New Hampshire and, to a lesser extent, Massachusetts. We play the only game in town in early January and at the same time begin to allocate matching revenues to New Hampshire and, particularly, Massachusetts. At bottom, I believe we cannot risk helping someone else win Iowa [presumably Bayh] by staying out, leaving us after a strong New Hampshire showing with a Mexican standoff going into Massachusetts. We must, I think, do our part to keep Iowa muddled and make New Hampshire all the more critical."
Finally a showdown meeting was held among the combatants and Mo Udall himself, who finally committed himself to spending ten days in January and, according to one campaign aide, about $80,000. He rented a bus and toured the state more in the style of a primary-election campaigner seeking to turn out the vote than of a contestant in a caucus state trying to motivate the few party activists who determine precinct caucuses. And so, what had been a bad situation to start with became even worse.
Four days before the Iowa vote, the columnist Joseph Kraft wrote that Udall was indeed in so much trouble that if he "lags badly here, the pressure will be on him to get out of the race." Never mind that simultaneously Udall was building an effective organization in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. To avert disaster Udall finally turned to extensive television advertising to try to bridge the gap between him and Carter, but this resort to television was in itself an acknowledgment of organizational failure.
In his room at the Ramada Inn in Dubuque early one morning, several days before the Iowa caucuses, Udall sprawled in a chair and talked frankly about the outlook. He underscored his own understanding of the importance of perception in politics, and how it can become the reality. "I think my campaign is catching on and doing well in other states, " he said, "and we expect to survive here." Survive. That was hardly the way for a candidate to be talking more than a month before the first primary in New Hampshire. But the word accurately reflected Udall's state of mind—and the reality of his political situation. Failure to do passably in Iowa would send the temperature soaring in the psychological pressure cooker, and he knew it.
A great irony in Udall's entry in Iowa to muddle the picture, and prevent Bayh from jumping to the forefront of the liberal pack, was the fact that Bayh himself had entered Iowa to hold Udall back. "The reason we went in," Bill Wise, Bayh's press aide, said later, "was to block Udall and the start he had in New Hampshire." Thus, by withdrawing from Iowa Udall could have frustrated Bayh's effort.
Bayh, though he began to campaign in Iowa rather late, suffered the pitfall of excessive expectations, and largely through his own blundering. He plunged into the state, trying hard with personal campaigning and labor support of questionable deliverability to close the gap with Carter. Declaring himself the "electable" candidate on whom most Democrats could agree, Bayh thus made it essential to win—or surrender the argument of his electability. On the final weekend, he bused in a flock of young Indiana supporters to go door-to-door for him—a step that must be done much earlier if it is to be effective (time is needed to screen out nonsupporters and "leaners"). And in the excitement of the closing hours, his lieutenants let their enthusiasm get the best of their judgment. A straw poll at a large gathering of most of the candidates in Sioux City—a labor stronghold—on the Sunday before the vote showed Bayh comfortably ahead, 36.3 per cent to 28.8 per cent for Carter. Dick Sykes, Bayh's young Iowa campaign coordinator, told me it was just a question of whether there was still enough time to "overtake Carter." A comment like that had the effect of raising expectations, when Bayh's real objective in Iowa had been not to beat Carter, whom he did not see as an immediate competitor, but to deal with Udall, Shriver, and Harris. But now Bayh's people were saying he was in a horserace with Carter, and they would have to bear the psychological burden of it.
Harris, by contrast, though he had gone to Iowa more frequently even than Carter and was one of the big spenders there, approached the caucuses more cautiously. Because so little was expected of him, he had everything to gain and very little to lose. Just as Bayh was expected to do well because he was supposedly "electable," Harris was by all odds considered "unelectable" because of his positions on the corporate structure of America, which were perceived as too far out of the mainstream of Democratic politics. But his diligent volunteer organizing team milked the high intensity of his support for its maximum yield.
The two other active candidates in the field were also not expected to do well. Henry Jackson made a rather feeble attempt to mobilize the Iowa Jewish community, and Sargent Shriver hoped to cull a respectable showing in the Catholic strongholds of Dubuque and Carroll County. But in neither case were the stakes high, because the expectations were so low. (Shriver's high name recognition did not turn out to be much help. The Kennedy clan and its long list of old political and social associates who had turned out in droves for his declaration of candidacy were in short supply in Iowa. Sarge had been given a great bon-voyage party at the pier; now, as he sailed off, most of them stood on the dock and waved.)
A highly vocal, highly visible segment of the Catholic vote, in Iowa as elsewhere, was the so-called right-to-life movement—the fervent foes of abortion who have been seeking a constitutional amendment to bar all abortion and thus negate the Supreme Court ruling that a woman and her doctor have the unrestricted right to end her pregnancy in its first three months. Each of the six active candidates in Iowa was confronted by "pro-lifers" who demanded to know whether he would support such a constitutional amendment. None would. A few, notably both Shriver and Carter, expressed their unequivocal opposition to abortion as a matter of personal or religious conviction, but there appeared to be little to choose between them—that is, until Carter, in response to a question from a local Catholic newspaper, offered that under certain circumstances he might accept "a national statute" restricting abortion. Also, according to the columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Carter, when asked by a young "pro-life" woman whether he would support a constitutional amendment uniformly applying to all states the antiabortion ban in a Georgia law voided by the Supreme Court, "whispered" (their word) that "under certain circumstances I would." These observations managed to convey to pro-life adherents the notion that Carter was more favorably disposed to their point of view than any of the other candidates; so much so, in fact, that in some Catholic churches priests spoke of Carter as the preferred candidate on the issue of abortion. Carter, pressed by reporters for clarification, said he opposed a constitutional amendment but would favor any law, not in conflict with the Supreme Court decision, that would restrict abortions through better planned parenthood, availability of contraceptive devices, and improved adoption procedures. All these were measures favored by all the candidates but—significantly—not enunciated in just this way.
Evans and Novak subsequently reported that Carter's intentional ambiguity on abortion had "made the difference between first and second place" in Iowa by undercutting the only Catholic candidate, Shriver, with Catholic voters. They reported that when Democratic National Committeeman Don O'Brien, Shriver's in-state manager, convinced Monsignor Frank Brady of Sioux City that Carter was trying to work both sides of the abortion issue, Monsignor Brady had checked Atlanta and been surprised to learn that Carter indeed opposed an antiabortion constitutional amendment. When he went on local television to denounce Carter, his action came too late.
Carter's handling of the abortion issue in Iowa was a signal of things to come. He would display a talent for being on two sides of an issue that both dismayed and frustrated his opponents. In a political society accustomed to having its leading figures neatly compartmentalized as liberals and conservatives, Carter defied such categorizing. Why should a candidate be liberal or conservative down the line, he argued, when most of the American people were not? In his intensifying battle with the media over his unwillingness to be pigeonholed or, indeed, pinned down on any detail concerning his major proposals, he dismissed the insistence on clear-cut responses by saying that reporters asked him "frivolous" questions that the public really didn't care about.
Typical was his response to inquiries about one of his major campaign promises: to cut the federal bureaucracy from 1900 agencies to 200, just as he had reduced Georgia's 300 state agencies to 22 during his gubernatorial term. In Sioux City, about a week before the Iowa caucuses, a local reporter asked him to specify which federal agencies he would abolish. He replied that it was "impossible to say now" because he hadn't been able to take a close enough look. Later, when I pressed him on it, he remained adamant to the point of mild irritation. "I may set up a task force after the convention," he said as we flew across the state in his small chartered plane. "I'm not being evasive. People have common sense. They don't expect me to have all the answers. Reagan has been making the mistake by getting tied to a specific commitment. I have some ideas. For instance, there are forty-two federal agencies in education. I don't know now which could be cut. It would just be conjectural. It would just be a guess on my part."
Later, in Vermont, New Hampshire, and the interview at Peter Bourne's in Washington, I tried other tacks, all unavailing. In Washington, when I asked him why he didn't set up a task force to look into one specific area as a pilot example of how his reorganization would work, he told me that his staff and others "have been working on an analysis for, I'd say, about a year," but he was unable or unwilling to be more specific. The forty-two education agencies could be cut to two, he told me on another occasion. Which two? He couldn't say. "I know the techniques that must be used," he said, "and also the difficulties involved to make guesses about what will be the form of the government three years from now. That's something I don't care to do." Why not? Because it was just a matter of press curiosity; the public couldn't have cared less, and he wasn't going to permit himself to be hung up on it. "I think that most voters have enough judgment to know that a candidate for President can't spell out the form of government that's going to exist three years after the candidate is in office, after a complete analysis of what the structure of the government is and ought to be," he argued.
This confidence in his ability to convince the public, without being specific, to get the public to trust him on the details, was at the core of Carter's campaign style and strategy, and of his attitude toward the press. From the beginning, in Iowa, his campaign was oriented to the individual voter; the premise was that if he could ignite a spark with the people, the press would have to come around. Supporters once made remained supporters, because they were not simply supporters made, but friends made. And not only Carter engaged in this Good Shepherd exercise; his wife, Rosalynn, his sons, and his sister, Ruth Stapleton, a sexy blond mother who was also a professional evangelist, all worked Iowa like some foreign mission whose natives had not found salvation, but only needed to hear the word.
Carter's campaign in Iowa and other early caucus and primary states was patterned rather interestingly on something called "the pioneer mission," in which Carter was involved in 1967, after his first and unsuccessful race for governor against Lester Maddox. As he told me later, his church in Plains, Georgia, leased long-distance telephone lines and, in conjunction with a small Baptist college in Pennsylvania, proceeded to identify families in several northern towns that were without religion. "They hired WATS lines they could use at night," Carter said. "And they called and identified one hundred families in this little community of about eleven thousand people, and in none of those families was there a Christian. They didn't have any church affiliation. We didn't want to go up and proselyte people who had other religious beliefs, so we went up there with the names and addresses of these people on cards, and we stayed there until we visited every one of those families. And we witnessed to them about our Christian faith and when we left, we had organized a new church."
In Iowa and subsequent 1976 political battlegrounds, Jimmy Carter not only witnessed to voters about his Christian faith but about his faith in the nation and the American people. And when he left, he had organized his own church of political believers, thoroughly committed to him, willing to work with a zest and dedication approaching his own. And like a missionary so convinced of the Word that he was confident his new church would stand against all manner of secular pressures, Jimmy Carter openly disdained the demands of the infidel press that he speak in specifics, that he say exactly what his general proposals would do, would cost. He asked of voters the same "leap of faith" that is at the core of religious belief, and to a remarkable degree they gave it to him.
Carter's approach also took at face value the belief, fallen into disfavor during the Nixon years, that a campaign for the presidency is and should be an educational process, not only for the voter but for the candidate himself. I have noted elsewhere that John F. Kennedy first came upon the full meaning of the toll taken on human beings in coal-mining when visiting mines in West Virginia as he campaigned there in 1960, and the searing experience colored not only his candidacy but later his presidency. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, in 1968 so insulated himself that he failed to grasp the burning intensity of the protests against Vietnam and against racial prejudice in the land. What I said then about Nixon could never have been said about Carter in 1976: "In the most antiseptic, controlled campaign in American history, he was a candidate in a glass booth. ... It was difficult for a candidate who had been so effectively sealed off from genuine dialogue with the public, and from debate with his opponents, to grasp the depth of the public passions . . . and the resoluteness of those who disagreed with him. . . . One of the striking things about Richard Nixon all along his determined road back was that he seemed so often to be traveling it by helicopter—hovering above, studying the route, but never absorbing anything emotionally from the pilgrimage. In public, he seemed often to be a spectator in his own drama, or at best the guest of honor in a series of testimonials. Spontaneity was avoided like a Viet Cong land mine. And in his constant courting of the presidential image, there never was the harried, loose-necktie image of the personally involved, seeking campaigner that often adds a humanizing element to his quest, and warms the voter to the candidate."
At a time when much was written about the punishing demands imposed on candidates by the nominating system, Carter told voters it was his pleasure, his joy, to be among them, learning from them. This was something new—a candidate telling voters that the madness he was enduring to be elected President was not madness at all, but a cherished opportunity to learn—about them and about the country. He was not the first candidate to talk this way, but the same words in the mouths of the likes of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were a transparent ploy. Johnson in his last embattled days as President would go off to a totally insulated military base, shake a few hands, make a chest-thumping speech, and return saying he had talked to The People. And Nixon was forever inventing little old ladies in crowds whom only he seemed to see and hear, who posed questions undetected by accompanying reporters that he would proceed to answer in his most self-serving manner: "And she asked me, 'Mr. Nixon,' she said, 'why do you say that?' And I answered, 'Madam, I say that because . . .'"
But Jimmy Carter did in fact talk to the people, often at great length. It was forever a source of frustration for his staff that this man who insisted always on being on time—in order not to give offense or, putting it positively, to show he cared—would stop in a crowd and start a dialogue with anyone who asked him a question. He would respond fully, and then ask, "Have I answered your question?" Perhaps more than any other campaigner in recent times, Carter could truly say that he was out among the people, conversing with them, and learning from them. And this self-education was perhaps an element in his steadfast conviction that categorical answers were not always the best, that people did not always come down squarely on one side or another of an issue, but often had mixed views. He campaigned with almost a haughty confidence that what the press saw as dissemblance on issues would be understood as reasonableness and common sense by voters, who themselves seldom saw things in clear black and white. In Iowa, he talked about what 260 days on the road in 1975 had done for him: "I feel better than I did a year ago. I'm relaxed and confident. I'm a lot more sure of myself. I know a lot more about this country than I would have if I hadn't been to Sioux City three times, or to Florida for twenty-five days."
(...) Other presidential candidates—notably Harris, Udall, Bayh, and Shriver—also went out among the people, striving to build a sense of personal association. Harris appealed to the restless young voter, radicalized by the Vietnam war and by dislike of the glaring economic inequities in American society, but he always seemed more the head of some rag-tag, blue-jeaned cult of the disaffected than a political statesman able to lead all segments of society. Udall on the stump as in private was gracious and witty, yet he somehow failed to transmit certainty about where he was going. Bayh was simply an old-fashioned pol operating behind an eager-youth facade, and his attempts to be taken as a heavyweight offered a glaring contrast with his glad-handing style. And Shriver, for all his impressive record and a penchant while campaigning for dressing like an enlisted man, had an air of an aristocrat out among the field hands for the day, trying his damnedest to extend noblesse oblige. Only Carter seemed in the early going to achieve personal closeness with an appreciable segment of the electorate he encountered.
On the night of January 19 the Carter mission paid off. In 2530 individual precinct caucuses in Iowa, in schoolrooms, church basements, libraries, and private living rooms, Democrats gathered to start the process that led to the national convention of 3008 delegates in New York's Madison Square Garden in July. I attended Des Moines precinct No. 59, in the basement recreation room of the Simpson United Methodist Church. There, thirty-five Democrats out of nine hundred thirty-seven registered in the precinct, one of the city's two largest, showed up to select seven delegates to the county convention. The precinct chairman, a thirty-year-old Des Moines lawyer named Pat Payton, explained the rules: the participants would form smaller caucuses of their own in various corners of the room according to candidate preference—the Carter people at one table, the Jackson people at another, the uncommitted people over in a corner, and so on. To elect a county delegate, a candidate would have to claim at least 15 per cent of the precinct caucus vote, or in this case, roughly five votes. If the backers of a given candidate failed to achieve that 15 per cent, they would be allowed to recaucus and join another candidate's group. While a crowd of costumed round dancers pranced obliviously on the floor above—a crowd larger than those gathered in the basement for the important business of electing a President—Payton gave the word to start. Twelve of the thirty-five made a Carter group; eight sat with the undecideds, and eight for Jackson; four joined a Harris caucus and three a Bayh; Udall, Shriver, and Wallace were shut out.
Payton, counting heads, told the Harris and Bayh caucuses that they each had failed to achieve 15 per cent of the total but could join another group. Of these seven, one Harris person moved over to the Carter table, one joined the uncommitteds, and two threw in with the three Bayh people, just enough to qualify him at 15 per cent. So Carter, with thirteen votes, was entitled to three of the precinct's seven delegates; the uncommitted caucus of nine, to two delegates; Jackson with eight and Bayh with five to one each.
Most of the Carter people said they had met the candidate personally or one of his family, and they liked his style. The Harris person who switched to Carter, Rick Hoenig, a twenty-seven-year-old employee of a local oil company, told me, "I really couldn't make up my mind which one I wanted. I prefer Harris on most things. I didn't want to say undecided. And I like Carter's sincerity, and maybe I sense there's support for the man here." Was he saying he liked to be with a winner? "Yes, in a sense," he said, in a response that would be heard from many a Carter voter in the year ahead. "I guess that's what I'm here for."
All over Iowa that night, that experience was being repeated. At the Des Moines Hilton, just across from the airport, the Democratic State Committee and the national press corps gathered to compile and report about 1976's first hard vote for the presidency. So novel was the presence of such television luminaries as Roger Mudd of CBS that State Chairman Tom Whitney peddled admission just to watch. And from the very first posting it was clear that it would be Jimmy Carter's night, the first of many. Shortly after midnight, with nearly 40 per cent of the precincts reporting, Carter had 34 per cent of the total. He ultimately slipped to just under 28 per cent, trailing the uncommitted slate, which had about 37 per cent, but he still maintained a margin of more than two to one over his next rival, Bayh. The final vote was Carter 27.6 per cent, Bayh 13.1 per cent, Harris 9.9 per cent, Udall 5.9 per cent, Shriver 3.3 per cent, and the rest undecided or split among other candidates.
Carter was in bed in New York, at the apartment of Howard Samuels, a former Democratic gubernatorial hopeful, when Powell phoned him at about 2 a.m. with the news. Greg Schneiders, Carter's efficient and outspoken personal aide, a twenty-nine-year-old former Washington restaurant and bar operator, took the call and summoned the candidate, who talked to Tim Kraft. Carter had been discussing with him where he would go, and now he told Kraft: "I guess we won't have to send you to Alaska now." Then he unceremoniously went back to bed.
Carter the next day was modest in victory. "I think just one state's results out of fifty is certainly a premature basis on which to predicate who is and who isn't a front-runner in the final election," he said. Fred Harris, who with about 10 per cent finished a surprising third, was not so modest. "Iowa started the winnowing-out process," he said, "and we've been winnowed in."
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