Chewing the Fat in Iowa

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

There have been some subtle changes around the town square of Greenfield, Iowa (pop. 2,244), where the real grass roots grow. The Ideal Cafe, dispensary of ribaldry, weak coffee and occasional political wisdom, has metamorphosed into Toad's Place, so named for a town boy who went to California but in the nick of time saved his soul, bought the business and headed back.

The customers at Toad's are mostly the same, but the talk is a little different.

These folks are not at all certain that the presidential caucuses have worked out the way they hoped. Everybody knew that the caucuses were built into kind of a glitzy new service industry designed to bring in the city sharpies with all their money. In February, Iowa has a surplus of snow, gray skies and idle hours. Only money and pool halls are in demand. This year the fellows at Toad's said that none of them got a single dollar of the $10 million lured into the state. Most of the money went to television stations, hotels and car-rental agencies, an alarming number of which are owned by people back East--slickered again.

There also is the realization that as the electronic ringmasters took over politics, the people of Iowa became little more than props in a national entertainment. The lowans choose the delegates but somehow that role seems to diminish next to the self-important punditry of network anchors and political consultants.

They hit the state like Barnum & Bailey and then fold their tents in the dead of caucus night.

Outsiders were always more hyped about politics than the gang at Toad's. The surprising success of the Iowa State University basketball team (14-9 this very moment) and the equally surprising defeats of the University of Iowa (10-13) have been topic No. 1. There's been a little Olympic palaver, and when the battleship New Jersey opened up on Lebanon, that was a priority conversation.

There was a chuckle or two at Toad's last summer when Walter Mondale showed up on a beastly hot day to commemorate former Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who was born down the road. Everybody was sweating but Mondale seemed to be sweating the most. The consensus at Toad's was that Mondale took fright at the possibility of being linked to the leftist politics of Wallace, who when dropped by Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 went off and formed a radical third party. The ceremony decorously dwelled on Wallace's contributions to hybrid seed corn, which cooled Mondale off. But there was never much enthusiasm for Mondale at Toad's.

George McGovern captured their fancy for a moment. When he told farmers that if Ronald Reagan were re-elected they should sell their farms and build bomb shelters, there was an approving snort or two. McGovern was the only other real candidate besides Mondale to show up around Greenfield. The rest sent their relatives.

And that's another thing. The Democratic powers at Toad's declared one morning: "No more kinfolks. If the candidates themselves don't come, they can forget it." Ethel Kennedy and her son Joe were good crowd builders back in 1980 when they were working for Teddy. Greenfielders have got blase. They didn't turn out for Glenn's daughter, Cranston's son or Hart's wife.

Nor is the prospect of seeing a real live network anchor on Iowa soil all that great. One of the boys at Toad's slipped in the ultimate putdown: "Watching an anchorman is like watching an astronaut in orbit: they are both weightless."

There is only one outlander eagerly awaited at Toad's. Spring will be coming around in a couple of weeks, all flirty and capricious. But in the end lowans know she'll settle down and the whole state will be back doing what it does best--growing things.