"It Seems to Work"

By Hugh Sidey

When the votes are all tallied and the goodbyes said and the clasps of work- thickened hands finished, the lingering flavor of the Iowa caucuses in the chill February night will be rich brownies and giant chunks of fudge mixed with laughter and hugs for neighbors and the silent thanks for the right to do what they have just done. The people of this down-to-earth state will have made the first significant declaration to the world about whom the American electorate has in mind to be the next President. Serious business.

"I can't stand cigar smoke," says Johnson County Farmer Harry Seelman. "I believe in democracy. It's a duty." That is his explanation of why he will rally at least eight of his twelve children, load them with his wife Lucille into the family's gray 1980 Chevy Citation (a veteran of 105,000 dusty miles) and head to Union Township's caucus in nearby West High School for the clear and open ritual of boosting Massachusetts Democratic Governor Mike Dukakis. No back-room dealing for Seelman. And no pussyfooting on the tough issues. "The Dukakis farm plan is not as good as Gephardt's," says Seelman, whose land has been in the family for more than 150 years. "It's just the sense of the man. Franklin Roosevelt didn't know much about farming, but he knew what to do. He saved us."

They no longer need emergency treatment out in Iowa, but they want some help as they weave modern industry and service into the old, faltering heartland matrix of small towns and family farms. These crafty Iowans have stopped feeling sorry for themselves because of the agriculture price collapse and have begun hustling. They make gin and vodka out of surplus corn, and they are thinking about growing strawberries and snails as well as soybeans. There are deer herds in the valleys, and the pheasant population is 2 million, which is not like hogs (13.8 million) or cattle (4.6 million) or even people (2.8 million), but it all means economic diversity and jobs.

The caucus process has become an industry in itself, which is somewhat troubling. State leaders see a gain from big media attention. Des Moines Restaurant Impresario Guido Fenu figures to do an extra $20,000 in business because of the political groupies who now inundate the Savery Hotel. James Barnes, chief political reporter for the National Journal, sought out a "typical" Republican home in Des Moines to witness the reaction to the debate of the candidates a fortnight ago. When he arrived, a crew from the C- SPAN network was in the living room, and one from a local station soon rolled up. The housewife loved it all, a newly crowned media queen.

Iowa keeps 93% of its rich loam in farms, the heritage of a century of building a special culture on that treasure. There are in Iowa eight cities with populations over 50,000 but none with more than 200,000. Crowding is almost nonexistent, and so the attendant evils of crime and hopelessness are minimal. The core of the population also has some link to those people who first halted on the tallgrass prairie and sank their plows. Writes Author John Madson, an eloquent native Iowan: "Grassland of such magnitude was wholly alien to the western European mind. It diminished men's works and revealed them to a vast and critical sky, and forced people into new ways of looking at the land and themselves and changed them forever."

Indeed, many of the first adventurers hurried on to the Rocky Mountains to trap beaver. Gold seekers cursed the great weathers of the grass country that seared them in summer and drove iced spikes into their souls in winter. Had they looked down, they would have seen earth that in 1900, only a half-century later, would produce 1 1/2 times the wealth put out by all the world's gold mines. But coaxing wealth from sun and soil and water is a process of patience and presence. Nomads have little understanding of that life, and movement is much of presidential politics.

This opening struggle for the presidency is a roving and restless assault on the sensibilities of the Iowans. The candidates and their handlers come in droves, encased in gleaming jets, dressed in dark pinstripes and tasseled shoes, determined to make the caucuses a stage that their men can exploit. Events propel them so rapidly that even if they wanted to understand Iowa, they would not have time. Hence George Bush talks about debutante parties as if Dubuque were Greenwich, and Gary Hart thinks he can somehow walk away from an indulgent weekend. Pete du Pont promotes school vouchers that just might sink a lot of Iowa community schools already pressed to keep up the high quality established when corn sold high. Though Paul Simon, Richard Gephardt and Bob Dole come from neighboring states, they are power dwellers, long gone from the quiet desperations of Main Street. Anyway, they cannot linger too long. Iowa is January's campground for media on the presidential march.

Almost daily some story or broadcast is sent out from Iowa that laments the "bleak and frozen landscape." Frozen it is, sometimes as deep as five feet if no snow cover comes to hold in the natural heat. But bleak? Bleak is in the eye of the beholder. Eagles congregate in winter along the Mississippi. Kids whack cans across frozen ponds and belly flop on their sleds down crystalline hills. And on some nights, with moonlight glazing the fields, come the howls of coyotes, a surviving shiver from other centuries when great adventure lay over that uncharted horizon.

"I'll take the Iowa caucus as an accurate measure more seriously than the New Hampshire primary," insists Writer Madson. Its political system is almost free of corruption. Its kids always score among the top on national exams. "The accident of the caucuses in Iowa is a happy accident," declares Novelist Frank Conroy, a transplanted Easterner.

Yet Iowans were, and perhaps are, capable of some rascality. George Mills, Iowa journalist and historian, relates that in the early caucuses the requirement that time and place be posted on a tree was sometimes met by partisans' peeling the bark away, nailing the notice on the bare spot, then tacking the bark back over the notice. Once, says Mills, progressives found an old barn that they torched just as the Republican caucus began, and the unwitting standpatters rushed out of the hall to help with the fire while the progressives stayed, voted their will, then adjourned.

There probably will not be any barn burnings on this caucus night. But the airwaves will have been heated with exorbitant claims of the leadership qualities of the candidates, and the television folk heroes will have arrived along with 2,499 other journalists. The hype will reach to the far stars. Iowa will seem far bigger than it really is. America will have to rely on the enduring sense of those quiet heartland people.

So Cornelia Hoy on the big night will gather up her sugar cookies, spread a little cream-cheese frosting on them and go on down to the Raccoon Valley State Bank's community room in Adel, a town rejuvenated by yuppies who live there and work in Des Moines. She will meet precinct Co-Chairwoman Jean Siegrist, and they will check the coffeemaker, open up the doors and wait for their fellow Republicans to arrive. When the greetings are over, they will bring the caucus to order and ask their neighbors to cast the secret ballot that is the crucial straw vote on the presidential candidates. The count will be tallied and then beamed around the world. "It's a pretty amateurish affair," says Mrs. Hoy. "We sort of stumble through it, but it seems to work." The story of these United States.