Gary Hart, George McGovern, John Glenn y Alan Cranston toman parte en un foro sobre la participación de las minorías en el gobierno organizado por la Brown and Black Coalition (Coalición de Marrones y Negros) en Des Moines, Iowa, el 10 de enero de 1984. El favorito para ganar el caucus y la nominación, Walter Mondale, no acude al foro. (Foto: Bettmann).
El caucus demócrata de Iowa de 1984, relatado por John C. Skipper en el libro The Iowa Caucuses: First Tests of Presidential Aspiration:
After the 1980 elections, the Democrats were in the mood to reform once again. The reforms that had taken hold in 1972 opened up the nominating process to more women, minorities and young people. But it had also produced elections in which one of their candidates, George McGovern, lost 49 out of 50 states, and another, Jimmy Carter, rose from virtual obscurity to win the presidency, but, in the opinion of voters, didn’t handle it very well and was soundly defeated in his bid for reelection by Ronald Reagan. When the top of a party ticket is struggling, officeholders further down the line get nervous about their own political survival.
The party bosses, who once controlled the process, and who had picked winners such as John F. Kennedy in 1960, wanted some of that power returned to them. They were stung not only by the poor showing of Carter in the November election but by how Senator Ted Kennedy, who had immense popularity at the national convention, was prevented from competing for the nomination on the convention floor because a majority of delegates were already bound, by party rules, to Carter.
The solution was to change the rules to make sure that scenario did not happen again. A commission was formed, headed by North Carolina governor James Hunt, to come up with some reforms.
Congressman Gillis Long of Louisiana was a beneficiary of the Long political machine that started with his uncles, Huey Long and his brother Earl, who each had been governor, and continued with Huey’s son, Russell, who currently was a powerful United States senator. Gillis Long testified before the Hunt Commission about the importance of control—in effect, pleading for a return to a form of the party boss system of nominating candidates.
He said, “We in the House, as the last vestige of Democratic control at the national level, believe we have a special responsibility to develop innovative approaches that respond to our party’s constituencies.”
Weeks later, Hunt spoke at Harvard University and amplified on the same theme. He said, “We must give our constituencies more flexibility to respond to changing circumstances in cases where the voters’ mandate is less than clear.”
The commission’s solution was the creation of superdelegates— unelected, unfledged delegates who could go to the national convention and vote for whomever they chose.
As writer Ari Berman put it: “It returned power to the elected officials and party regulars. They (superdelegates) included all Democratic members of Congress and every governor. Roughly half of them were Democratic National Committee officials elected by state parties.”
The new rules called for several hundred of the delegates to be superdelegates. In other words, to some degree at least, the party bosses were back in business. Historian Rhodes Cook said superdelegates were to serve several purposes. They were to “re-engage Democratic leaders across the country in the presidential nominating process, add an element of ‘peer review’ that had been missing from the process since the 1970s and create a firewall to blunt any party outsider that built up a head of steam in the primaries.”
An irony to the new rules is that while they were established in part because of what happened to Kennedy at the convention in 1980, they were opposed by many Kennedy supporters who thought he might make another run in 1984 and feared that other Democrats, such as former vice president Walter Mondale, might benefit more from superdelegate support. As it turned out, Kennedy didn’t run and Mondale did benefit from superdelegate support.
Their importance went well beyond the presidential nominating process. “If the convention’s platform committee is adopting something that would be really detrimental in the general election, the party leaders can take steps to prevent that from happening,” said Elaine Karmack, a teacher at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government . In other words, it was another example of the firewall referred to by Cook.
U.S. senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, who was to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 1992, said his view of why superdelegates were created was not a power play as much as it was another means of keeping the process open. “The reason they did it in the first place is that if we, as office-holders, ran to be delegates and won, we’d cut other deserving people out of the process. So the thought was to make us automatic delegates and give others the chance to be elected,” he said.
The Hunt Commission also set up changes that compressed the length of the primary and caucus seasons while keeping the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary number one and number two. That was important to candidates such as Senator Alan Cranston of California, Senator John Glenn of Ohio and Governor Reuben Askew of Florida who, following the example of Carter in 1976 and George Bush in 1980, campaigned early and often in Iowa.
As one newsmagazine proclaimed in its May 24, 1982 edition, “Believe it or not, the 1984 presidential race is already on in Iowa.”
Kennedy was still the straw that stirred the drink in Democratic politics. So when Kennedy announced, on December 1, 1982, that he would not run for president in 1984, it opened the gates for other Democrats to formally announce what they had been thinking about and working towards for a long time. The candidate lineup filled up quickly.
On February 2, 1983, Senator Alan Cranston of California announced. Cranston, 69, had been in the Senate since 1969 and had been Democratic whip for the past six years. Cranston had the distinction of having once been sued by Adolf Hitler. A journalist in his younger days, he noticed that the American edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf had excluded many of the German dictator’s inflammatory and anti–Semitic comments. So Cranston published an unabridged version and added some annotations of his own. Hitler’s publisher sued for copyright infringement and won.
Cranston favored a worldwide nuclear freeze and campaigned heavily on that theme. He spent more time in Iowa than any other Democratic candidate and had the misfortune of looking like a man who was nearing the age of 70. He was bald and gaunt and the age difference between him and his opponents in Iowa was easy for voters to recognize. To compensate, Cranston dyed the white fringe above his ears as well as his eyebrows a color that was closer to orange than brown.
David Yepsen, political writer for the Des Moines Register, said Cranston was a distinguished senator who expressed himself well when he went toe to toe with other candidates and took unfair ribbing in the media for dying his hair. “Hell, they all dye their hair,” said Yepsen.
Next to enter the race, on February 17, 1983, was Senator Gary Hart, 47, of Colorado, the lawyer who ran McGovern’s failed 1972 presidential campaign—a campaign that might not have ever developed had Hart not used the media to spin McGovern’s strong showing in the Iowa caucuses that year. Hart was a graduate of Yale Law School and Yale Divinity School. He was a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice for two years, was elected to the Senate in 1974 and was re-elected in 1980. Hart was an eloquent speaker and knew how to put together an organization in caucus states.
He also knew the value of meeting voters face to face—and how to do it on a limited budget. In laying the groundwork for his presidential campaign, Hart came to Iowa in 1982 to campaign for Lynn Cutler, a woman striving to become Iowa’s first female in Congress (unsuccessfully, as it turned out). He met Steve Lynch, an accountant at the Sara Lee food plant in New Hampton, a small northern Iowa community. The two men immediately hit it off. When Hart returned to Iowa the following year, he and Lynch hooked up again.
“I knew his campaign manager. That’s how we got connected again,” said Lynch.
The campaign didn’t have a lot of money at the time. I had a van. In those days, not everybody had a van. But we could get him and me and his aides and a local TV guy and a newspaper reporter in my van and go from place to place. Sometimes, we’d go places and there would only be five or six people there. It didn’t matter. Gary was a great one for punch lines. He’d say, “Did Abe Lincoln start like this?”
One time in late January or early February, I was driving on I-80 [the main east-west interstate highway across Iowa] and there was a terrible snowstorm. I was trying to follow the lead car but I could hardly see in front of me, it was snowing so hard. We had to go practically at a crawl. One of his managers kept telling me to be careful, that I was crossing the center line or that I was on the shoulder of the road and I don’t know how she could tell—because I couldn’t see anything. As it turned out, the lead car had turned off at an exit but I hadn’t seen it. We just kept going at a snail’s pace in that blinding snow.
We went for three hours like that when Gary nudged me and said, “Getting bad out, isn’t it.” We all just burst into laughter. We got to a motel in Dubuque [on the eastern edge of the state] and decided to go into the lounge to get something to eat and drink. They had the strangest act there. A woman came out in some sort of costume and sang. Then she would leave and come back in another costume and sing some more and she kept doing this. Finally, she came out dressed like a leopard. Gary leaned over to me and said, “I know Abe Lincoln didn’t start like this.”
Four days after Hart announced, on February 21, 1983, former vice president Walter F. Mondale, 55, made it official that he too was a candidate. Mondale, who 20 years earlier, when he was attorney general of Minnesota and a Hubert Humphrey protégé, helped broker the deal with the Mississippi Freedom Democrats, was clearly the front- runner in Iowa. He was elected to the Senate in 1968 as Humphrey’s replacement and served as Jimmy Carter’s vice president from 1977 to 1981. He obviously was the most experienced of all the candidates in national and international affairs and had the advantage of being the favorite of party bosses who, with the reforms of the Hunt Commission, had more say and more sway in the nominating process than they had experienced in the past 12 years.
In addition to all of this, he was from a neighboring state. In fact, as a youngster he grew up in southern Minnesota and was a delivery boy for the Mason City Globe Gazette, a daily newspaper in northern Iowa that had some subscribers in Minnesota.
But as Muskie learned in 1972, as President Ford did in 1976 and Ronald Reagan in 1980, being the front-runner in Iowa brings with it high expectations and the capacity to fall further than any of the other candidates.
“Rotten luck, Mondale, we’ve made you the front-runner,” wrote Russell Baker in the New York Times Magazine. “Without a front-runner, we’d have nobody to suffer surprising setbacks in the early stage of the campaign and without setbacks, we’d be stuck with a very dull story.”
On February 23, 1983, two days after Mondale’s formal entry, Reuben Askew, former governor of Florida, entered the race. Askew had once been considered a rising star in the Democratic Party and was the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention in Miami in 1972. Askew, 55, was elected governor of Florida in 1970 and re-elected in 1974. Florida law prohibited him from running for a third term. President Jimmy Carter appointed him as a U.S. trade representative, a position he held throughout the Carter administration.
Askew went into the campaign with some disadvantages. Democrats were not eager to nominate a southern governor so soon after Carter. Also, he lacked experience in national and international politics compared to some other Democrats in the race.
Grassroots campaigning, the mother’s milk of Iowa presidential politics ever since Jimmy Carter shook every hand he could find and left handwritten notes on the doors of potential supporters in 1975, had some built-in drawbacks. Candidates are so closely scrutinized that it doesn’t take long for their ill-spoken words or gaffes to become part of their legacy, such as Connally telling Iowa farmers “I never drowned anybody” in 1980. Many years after the 1984 campaign, those who were there recalled vividly a television interview Askew did with KIMT-TV in Mason City. While he was being interviewed, one of the bright klieg lights above him blew out. Askew flinched and ducked as if someone had taken a shot at him.
In April, Senator John Glenn of Ohio and Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings of South Carolina joined the fray. Glenn, 62, gained national fame more than 20 years earlier in the U.S. space program. On February 20, 1962, Glenn piloted the Friendship 7 spacecraft and became the first American to orbit the earth, a distinction that made him instantly recognized throughout the country but dogged him during his presidential campaign. Glenn had trouble shaking the astronaut image, even though he had served in the Senate since 1974.
It didn’t help that The Right Stuff, a movie about Glenn and other astronauts, came out in 1983. Glenn admitted that constant press references to his campaign “taking off” or “going into orbit” or worse, “not getting off the ground” or “fizzling” hurt his image as a statesman worthy of presidential consideration. A newspaper cartoon depicted two images of Glenn—one in a business suit, one in a spacesuit. In the caption, the Glenn in the business suit says to Glenn the astronaut, “Get out of here.”
Glenn was personable but not dynamic. His speeches were filled more with facts and figures than with vision and, for a man with such a celebrity status, he was not one to light a fire under any voters with his personality. He participated in the annual Fourth of July parade in Clear Lake, Iowa, a community of about 8,000 close to the Minnesota border. Afterwards, in the grand style of Iowa pre-caucus politics, he attended a luncheon at the home of Michael Grandon, the local county treasurer, and his wife, Mary.
Bill Schickel, the TV reporter who witnessed the klieg light blowout with Askew, attended the event at the Grandon home. He talked with Glenn and asked him how he responded to people who said that he lacked charisma. “Lack charisma?” said Glenn in mock disbelief. “I have charisma.” He then vigorously moved his feet for a few seconds as if doing a soft-shoe dance, then stopped and began talking politics again.
Hollings, 61, had been in the Senate eight years longer than Glenn and seemed to resent the public’s adulation for Glenn as an astronaut and what Hollings perceived to be Glenn’s lack of political experience. Known for his mint julep accent and his quick, often biting wit, Hollings often referred to Glenn condescendingly as Sky King (a fictional television character from the 1950s) and once chastised him in a debate, accusing him of still being “all confused in that ‘capsoool’ of yours.”
In September 1983, McGovern, now 62 years old, decided to make a third run for the presidency, running against, among others, five former Senate colleagues in Cranston, Mondale, Hollings, Glenn and Hart, the man who had run his 1972 campaign, as well as Askew, the former Florida governor who had been the keynoter at the 1972 convention that nominated McGovern.
The last entry into the Democratic sweepstakes was the Rev. Jesse Jackson, 42, a civil rights leader from Chicago who became the second black person to actively campaign for a presidential nomination (Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm had been the first in 1972). Jackson had been a protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King and was with King in Memphis when King was assassinated in 1968. Under King’s direction, Jackson started Operation Breadbasket, a civil rights initiative that promoted selective buying—a means of boycotting white businesses that did not hire blacks or purchase goods and services from black people. Later, he formed another activist group called Operation PUSH which later became the Rainbow Coalition.
The 1983 pre-caucus season was one in which forums became the event-du-jour for political candidates. Many of the forums had specific themes. On August 13, an Open Forum on Arms Control was held in Des Moines, sponsored by a peace organization and attended by Mondale, Hart, Cranston and Glenn. It was a forum tailor-made for Cranston, the most ardent nuclear freeze candidate. But it gave all of the candidates a chance to criticize President Reagan’s arms control policies.
On October 8, the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines drew seven candidates (Jackson had not yet entered the race) and 6,000 Democrats who ate dinner and listened to speeches. Another forum, on January 10, 1984, also in Des Moines, focused on civil rights. Cranston, Glenn, Hart and McGovern attended. The next forum in Ames on January 21, had agriculture as its topic and drew Askew, Cranston, Hart, Hollings and McGovern.
Historian Winebrenner noted, “The forum was a time for the candidates to reiterate familiar themes. With the campaign almost two years old, their positions were well developed and were well known to the active democrats most likely to attend the precinct caucuses. Most seemed to be trying to avoid mistakes before the large audience, but there were notable exceptions. Hollings and Jackson delighted the crowd with their candor and glibness, and McGovern made an impassioned plea to his supporters, asking them not to "throw away your conscience" by supporting a different candidate simply because it was widely believed that he, McGovern, had little chance in 1984. "Reagan bashing" was the most popular activity of the forum, as candidate after candidate attacked the "failed" policies of the administration. The media, with their "game" focus, concentrated their efforts on determining who had won or lost the debate.”
It is evident from the amount of campaign activity in the state that the compressed and front-loaded primary schedule did not minimize the importance of the Iowa caucuses. If anything the candidates emphasized the caucuses more in 1980.
Dinners brought in money, forums brought in television cameras, but grassroots campaigning—in barnyards and factories, in dining rooms and courthouse squares, at shopping malls and county fairs—still brought in the votes, or so the candidates believed. In the year prior to the 1984 caucuses, Hart, traveling by van from one rural town to another, spent 60 days in Iowa; Cranston, with his orange-tinged hair, spent 55; Askew was in the state for 47; McGovern 37; Mondale 34; Glenn 33; Hollings 14; and Jackson 1.
The caucus results:
Mondale 48.9%
Hart 16.5%
McGovern 10.3%
Uncommitted 9.4%
Cranston 7.4%
Glenn 3.5%
Askew 2.5%
Jackson 1.5%
Hollings 0.0%
Mondale, who benefited not only from being a former vice president but also from being from a neighboring state, was expected to win but not by a 33-percent margin. He exceeded expectations. So did Hart by finishing second even if it was a distant second. And from his experience in running McGovern’s campaign 12 years earlier, Hart knew how to capitalize on doing better than expected. Never mind that nearly 85 percent of caucusgoers, or more precisely, delegate equivalents, chose someone else. Hart trumpeted his good showing and parlayed it into a victory in New Hampshire eight days later. Hart articulated what the perception of a good showing in Iowa can do for a candidate. “You can get awful famous in this country in seven days,” he said.
As for those who didn’t meet expectations in Iowa, the Ted Kennedy syndrome from 1980 reappeared, and candidates disappeared. Cranston dropped out of the race on February 29, one day after finishing poorly in the New Hampshire primary. Hollings and Askew both withdrew on March 2. McGovern got out on March 13 and Glenn was gone on March 16. The death knell for all of them had sounded on the night of February 20 in Iowa because not enough Democrats had given up their bowling night or bridge club or they just didn’t care enough to give up 90 minutes of their lives to come to the caucuses and support them.
McGovern’s situation was particularly interesting. In 1972, he benefited from finishing second to Ed Muskie and, with the help of campaign manager Hart, parlayed that better than expected finish in Iowa all the way to the Democratic nomination.
Now, 12 years later, Hart, in taking second place, bested McGovern by only 1,500 votes. Yet, Hart got a media bounce going into New Hampshire, just as McGovern had in 1972—and McGovern, though coming ever so close to exceeding expectations, folded his tent not long after that.
Glenn said afterwards he made a tactical mistake by focusing too much attention on his national campaign and adapting that strategy to Iowa, a strategy that didn’t work. “Rather than concentrate on the traditional early battlegrounds of a contested nomination, I started focusing on building a nationwide organization aimed at the ‘sensible center,’” Glenn wrote in his autobiography.
He said his aim was to appeal to both Republicans and Democrats, which would help him develop a solid political base for the general election. In doing so, he said, “I failed to excite passion among the core constituencies most likely to vote in Democratic caucuses and primaries.”
On the Republican side, President Reagan, with no caucus opposition, came to Iowa once—on caucus day, February 20. His staff spent $194,000 in the state.
Iowa was reaping millions of dollars because of its first-in-the-nation status and the importance that politicians and the media put on it. It started with a slow mimeograph machine in 1972 but owed its enduring legacy to Carter four years later.
“When it came to running for president, no Democrat after Carter’s 1976 election would fail to be guided in his own contemplation of a candidacy, or usually in his implementation, by how Carter had used Iowa as a springboard to the White House.”
One footnote to the 1984 campaign: The perception of Hart exceeding expectations by finishing second in the Iowa caucuses, albeit with 16 percent support, created in effect a two-man race for the nomination (with Mondale), strengthened by the fact Hart won the New Hampshire primary eight days later.
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Hola Antxon! Cómo ves Iowa? Parece que Sanders sube en las encuestas, pero yo creo que puede pasar cualquier cosa...
ResponderEliminarPD: Lástima que Klobuchar esté en Washington estos días, que si no podría haber hecho sprint final... :D
Mantengo lo que le dije a Daniel más abajo. Mi pronóstico es: Victoria ajustada de Biden en el caucus de Iowa, victoria mayor de la prevista de Bernie en la primaria de New Hampshire, amplia victoria de Biden en Carolina del Sur... y de ahí en adelante la misma dinámica que vimos en la competición entre Hillary y Bernie, con Biden ganando en los estados sureños con mucho electorado negro, en las primarias cerradas y en estados demócratas clásicos (Massachusetts, Nueva York...) y Bernie ganando en los caucuses, en primarias más abiertas y en estados de poca tradición demócrata (Oklahoma, Idaho, Kansas...) y quizá esta vez en algún gran estado tipo California (no sé cuándo vota).
ResponderEliminarEse ya era el escenario más probable hace un año, así que todo un año de campaña no habrá servido de mucho.
Si Sanders encadena victorias en Iowa y New Hampshire, la competición será muuuy larga e incómoda para el partido, mucho más que la de 2016 porque entonces, aunque iba ganando cáucuses y pequeñas primarias, Sanders nunca nos hizo dudar en serio de la nominación de Hillary.
Si Biden gana en Iowa y Sanders en New Hampshire, entonces será como en el 16, siempre veremos a Biden por delante pero con Sanders acumulando delegados y desgastándolo.
Si Biden gana en Iowa y New Hampshire, como Kerry en 2004, serán unas primarias cortas.
Si cualquier otro candidato sorprende en Iowa o New Hampshire, ya sea ganando o quedando en un buen segundo lugar y desplazando a uno de esos dos favoritos al tercer puesto, la cosa sería más imprevisible. Pero tendría que ser alguien que represente a la facción contraria a la del ganador para poder recoger el testigo del que quede descolgado.
Este año los demócratas han cambiado la regla de los superdelegados. Por primera vez desde que fueron creados precisamente en el 84, los superdelegados no podrán votar en la primera votación de la convención; solo podrán votar si hay una convención abierta. Esa es una buena noticia para Sanders.
¿Klobuchar todavía es candidata?
Es verdad, no habia visto los comentarios. Mañana veremos!
ResponderEliminarPor cierto, he leido el mensaje de julio " me da que podrías dormir durante cinco meses y al despertar, en el mes de enero, verías a Biden en cabeza en las encuestas para la nominación demócrata. Y alguien te contaría lo mal que lo pasó Joe durante gran parte del otoño. Pero una vez que los medios de noticias falsas terminaron de encumbrar primero y hundir después a un puñado rivales de segunda fila (uno cada mes), todo volvió donde había empezado." En ese y algun otro mensaje parece que has dado en el clavo...
No era difícil pronosticarlo. No obstante el formato hace posible que haya alguna sorpresa en Iowa, ya que los que apoyan a candidatos que quedan por debajo del 15 por ciento en cada caucus están obligados a unirse a otro candidato. Si todos esos votantes que se queden sin candidato deciden ir con el mismo, con uno que no sea ni Biden ni Bernie, podría haber sorpresa.
ResponderEliminarLa última encuesta del Des Moines Register suele ser la gran referencia antes del caucus de Iowa. Pero extrañamente este año hand ecidido no hacerla pública por las quejas de la campaña de Butigieg. Me resulta muy sospechoso que decidan no publicarla justo cuando parece que Bernie está subiendo.