Iowa Caucuses: Not the Battle of the Century

DUBUQUE, Iowa -- In these final days before the Iowa caucuses, John Edwards' chance for the presidency comes down to people like Jim Clifford, trudging up an icy driveway to persuade Leo Oswald, a shipping clerk at the Georgia Pacific plant here, to turn out and support Edwards.

Clifford is among the many volunteers for the various presidential candidates who visit homes and make phone calls to get supporters to the caucuses. They are the unknown warriors of the campaign, but their work will make the difference between victory and defeat in Iowa.

I trudged alongside Clifford, a union member from California. Oswald was shoveling ice and snow from his driveway. He, like Clifford, was a strong Edwards and union man. But he explained that he will miss the caucus. Oswald works the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift and he'll be napping and getting ready for the job when caucuses are held at night. "Just won't have time," he said. As a matter of fact, he said, probably just 10 percent of the 125 union members at Georgia Pacific will attend the caucuses.

That is in line with a Des Moines Register poll estimate of 12 percent Republican and 10 percent Democrat attendance at caucuses around the state. That figure is substantially above the numbers for past caucuses reported by Pollster.com: Just 5.5 percent for Democrats in 2004 and 3.9 percent for Republicans in 2000. That is a tiny percentage of the 57,204 people living in Dubuque and the 2,944,062 residing in Iowa. Such a low level of involvement makes me wonder about news accounts that portray this as the battle of the century.

(At this point, I must digress. The caucuses are a travesty of the American political system. They are so undemocratic, unfair, unrepresentative and overly complicated that they deserve an entire column, which I will do soon. For this piece, all you have to know is that small groups of Democrats and Republicans get together in caucus meetings and select convention delegates pledged to various candidates.)

On television, the campaign appears to be as well plotted as an episode of "The West Wing." In real life, it's disorganized and random. When I return confused to my hotel room in Des Moines, I have to turn on CNN to get a sense of order, even if it's a false one. Correspondents, aided by producers and other support personnel in the CNN campaign bus and at headquarters, summarize the candidate's activities. Frequent recitation of polls, buttressed by interviews with voters and an occasional academic, give the reports an appearance of accuracy.

I encountered a much more uncertain story when I hooked up with Clifford and his co-worker, Donna Norton, a nurse at the Kaiser hospital in Vacaville, Calif. Norton is also a United Health Care Workers West leader and a mental health counselor at Kaiser in San Diego. I thought they were admirable -- true believers who left family and friends in California during the Christmas season to work for a presidential candidate.

We met in a coffee and sandwich shop in the nicely restored downtown section of Dubuque, a blue-collar city in northeast Iowa on the Mississippi River. It took more than three hours to get there, a trip slowed by fog.

Using lists given them by the Edwards campaign and the union, Clifford and Norton work 12 hours a day making phone calls to potential Edwards supporters and visiting them at home.

With Clifford at the wheel and Norton checking lists and me in the back seat, we drove through neighborhoods covered by snow. The homes were attractive, ample and unassuming. The people, said Norton, are Democratic, "very Catholic and very pro-life." If the pro-choice Edwards opposed abortion, she said, he would run away with the votes here.

They stopped whenever they came upon a house occupied by a prospect. Night shift worker Leo Oswald was our first call. Undeterred by Oswald's inability to attend a caucus, Clifford cheerfully engaged him in conversation. He got Oswald to talk about his workplace, and it turned out to be a story of multinationals, the villains in some of Edwards' speeches. One corporate owner after another, each one bigger than the last, putting the Dubuque plant further down the corporate ladder. "So it goes," said survivor Oswald.