Iowa: Setting the Scene
To prepare you for the Caucuses, the MoJo Wire sent our Iowa correspondent on the road with the candidates . . .
On the Road to Davenport
Davenport
Independence
Oelwein
Waterloo
By Stephen G. Bloom
The MoJo Wire On the road to Davenport
I'm driving on a country road in Eastern Iowa in the middle of Heartland America, following presidential candidate Phil Gramm's mud-splattered "Kitchen Table Express" Bus. The state's Republican Presidential caucus is four days away. After a month of sub-zero temperatures, today it's in the mid-30s, and Iowa is experiencing a mid-winter thaw. But snow still covers the corn fields, with stubbled stalks poking through frosted crust.
After his disastrous loss to Pat Buchanan on Tuesday in the Louisiana primary, Phil Gramm needs a knockout punch here. Forget the punch. Gramm might be happy with an elbow to the ribs. In Louisiana, he ended up with 8 delegates to Buchanan's 13--and that was after Gramm had garnered the backing of most of Louisiana's GOP heavy hitters.
In order to stay in the race, Gramm (by his own admission) will have to do no worse than third place in Iowa. With Bob Dole and Steve Forbes all but guaranteed the top two spots, Gramm is battling Buchanan and Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander for third.
Gramm plans to campaign non-stop in Iowa through Monday. Today (Thursday) the 53-year-old Texas senator with the Georgia drawl makes six campaign appearances in Eastern Iowa. After a morning event in Davenport (103,000), Gramm will stop off in a couple of towns spun out of Grant Wood paintings, glad handing at the Falcon Civic Center in Independence (population: 5,972), and waxing nostalgic ("My momma this, my momma that") at Olwein (population: 6.493).
These heartland towns are at the core of Iowa ("Ah-wa," in Grammspeak). If Gramm has a good showing here on Monday, he may keep his campaign alive - at least for a little while.
Davenport
Senator Phil Gramm's Kitchen Table Express Bus turns off East Seventh onto Farnam Street in a once-regal neighborhood overlooking the Mississippi River. Gramm has chosen a police sub-station for a "get tough on crime" speech.
The station is housed in an 1855 mansion built by Antoine LeClaire, a soldier in the Black Hawk Wars later turned wealthy industrialist. The neighborhood has recently fallen on tough times. Sergeant Dick Turnquist points out a two-story brick apartment building less than a block away that serves as the local crack house.
Gramm's advance people have gathered a handful of neighbors to hear the Senator wax ballistic about crime and punishment. "In the best neighborhoods in America, people are literally afraid to walk around their neighborhoods on a dark night," Gramm says, scanning the six members of the LeClaire Heights Neighborhood Association who showed up. (Including media, about 60 people have gathered to hear the speech.)
Then Gramm goes into his familiar refrain. "I want to stop building prisons like Holiday Inns. I want to take out the color TVs and the weight rooms. I want to turn our prisons into industrial parks." He talks about mandatory sentences for use of firearms during a crime. "I want ten years in prison without parole for possessing a firearm during the commission of a violent crime."
Gramm's audience doesn't seem convinced. Neighborhood association member Kenneth Wilmington says Gramm is way off base. "His crime bill is especially ridiculous. It seems like it's geared against minorities, against the blacks and Mexicans, because who's going to be doing that long stretch is going to be the underprivileged."
Jannette Higginson is also unimpressed. When asked for her take on Gramm's 40-minute stump, she says: "Please don't ask me to be political because I might get rude."
Independence
This afternoon Republican Presidential hopeful Phil Gramm takes his ailing campaign to the heart of Northeast Iowa's rich farming country, where pigs outnumber people ten to one, and where the crops of choice are corn, sorghum and soy beans.
Gramm's Kitchen Table Express bus sputters along State Route 150, a two-lane swath of concrete that passes farm-implement dealerships, grain elevators, and towering aluminum silos. An assortment of hog houses and farrowing buildings on either side of the highway completes the picture
The Texas Senator's advance people have turned out 70 supporters at the Falcon Community Center to hear Gramm's vague message of folksy charm mixed with icy chops to Washington Democrats and the other Republican contenders for Monday's Iowa Caucus.
"Families are very important," Gramm tells the crowd, filled mostly with retired farmers, some wearing John Deere caps. "The family is the fundamental unit of democracy. One out of three babies born in America today is born out of wedlock. We must work together to change that."
Leaning forward and wagging his index finger like a lecturing college professor, Gramm tells the crowd to get out last year's Christmas-card list, and to check it once or twice. "Don't underestimate your ability. By living in Iowa, you have to opportunity to change America."
"I like what he stands for," says Charles Kimball, a retired seed farmer from nearby Jesup who has attended two Gramm rallies in the last three months. His wife nods in agreement.
But Rob Mudd, 18, leaving the weight-lifting room in the community center, isn't so sure. "I'm gonna vote for Dole. He's more Midwestern."
Oelwein
At the Oelwein Community Center, which shares space with the Oelwein Chamber of Commerce and the Department of Transportation's Driver's License Bureau, Gramm is poised in his trademark stance: pigeon-toed, his head pitched, his lips pursed.
"My students at Texas A&M were smarter than my fellow members of Congress," says Gramm in a drawl not unlike that of another former Texas legislator, Lyndon B. Johnson.
"There is nothing moderate about me. No great cause has ever been won under the banner of moderation," the senator says.
To illustrate the point, Gramm spins to the crowd: "The one thing I can do in this race is stand on what I'm running on with my right foot, and stand on my record in the House and Senate with my left foot, and not have my feet so far apart that my britches split.
"That's something nobody else in this race can do."
Gramm also tells the story of his Great Uncle Bill, "the world's best checker player"; describes his views on Teddy Kennedy and health insurance; and complains about the "wasted" millions that go to the Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The crowd sizzles. "Gramm is better on the moral issues," says farmer David Balk, whose latest worry is what to do with his 80 head of 1,000-pound Holsteins in a market that is dropping faster than an Iowa sunset.
Retired farmer Albert Gathman agrees: "Gramm sticks to the issues. Dole is a waffler."
Gathman is an important wheeler-dealer in this Fayette County town of 6,493 residents. Gathman was his precinct's point man for Dole in 1988 and 1992, but no more. Dole can't beat Clinton, says Gathman, and that's what's most important.
Next Monday, Gathman and his wife will host their precinct's Republican Caucus in their living room. The results of Gathman's caucus meeting and that of 2,141 other caucus sites spread over Iowa's 99 counties will determine which Republican candidates win state's convention delegates.
Waterloo
The folks who turn out to see Republican Presidential hopeful Lamar Alexander are well-heeled and younger than those at the Gramm rallies in Northeastern Iowa. A contingent of students wearing Alexander's trademark red-and-black check shirts ring the hall of the Recreation Center (which is across the way from a Wonderbread factory). Few farmers are here. For a town of 73,000, most of the 150 people who show up for tonight's rally appear urbane. They might even pass for a crowd of upscale Democrats.
Alexander's spin is a left turn from Gramm's. His talk is general, almost Socratic. "Ask less of Washington, and ask more of ourselves," he tells supporters, who wear stickers that read ABC (Alexander Beats Clinton).
The former Tennessee governor and secretary of education may be the 90s Republican version of Jerry Brown's Governor Moonbeam: not much of a specific agenda, but an appealing obliqueness. "Changing the culture of Washington," he says, "is important if we want to change the culture of the nation."
Clinton, Alexander says, "zigs and zags" and "works out his mid-life crisis in public. He's the wrong person to have in the White House when we're trying to teach our children right from wrong."
Alexander then digs at millionaire media geek Steve Forbes, saying that Forbes "first-time out is better suited for a run at a school-board seat, not at the presidency."
Alexander closes with an impressive display of schmaltz. A baby grand piano is turned around toward the adoring crowd, and the 55-year-old candidate sits and plays PeeWee King's "Tennessee Waltz" and Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band."
For his finale, Alexander asks the crowd to stand and sing along as he plays "God Bless America." Amazingly, the schtick works - at least on this night in Northeast Iowa.