Iowa. I've never even been there, yet the place still gives me nightmares.
Four years ago, we were planning an "Iowa Watch" party at Dean headquarters on Coors Boulevard. Mona, our communications director, wanted the room filled with Iowa-related stuff. So I went out and bought corn. Popcorn, corn-on-the-cob, and other hokey stuff. Someone made posters, very corny posters, proclaiming how into Iowa we all were.
We weren't just trying to entertain ourselves by throwing a party. By this time, with New Mexico one of the early voting states, we were receiving lots of local and national media attention, and knowing the press would be there with their cameras, we wanted to give them something to focus on. Like eager volunteers, surrounded by corn husks in solidarity with our brothers and sisters toiling in the Iowa cornfields, cheering and working hard even as our candidate surged to victory in the Iowa caucuses.
We also needed some beer, to go with all that popcorn. About the time the caucuses were starting, one of the young staffers and I went on a beer run. I remember laughing and joking at the store while we selected beer and other party goods, and then arriving back at headquarters, bounding in with our arms full and our faces still bearing traces of laughter.
There was dead silence. No one was laughing, I remember. A pall had settled over the office. "What's wrong?" we asked, looking around at the long faces. Someone pointed at the tv monitor.
They were showing the final breakdown in Iowa already: Dean had 18 percent, a distant third place finish, far, far lower than any of us expected.
Our party suddenly turned into a deathwatch, and then the media arrived.
Mona gathered herself and quickly handed out phonebank lists, and we started dialing. Except some of us were too dejected to actually talk to voters. We called home instead. I talked to anyone who would listen, pasting a sickly smile on my face, in case any cameras panned around. We tried our best to project joy and unity in Deanville, and when our beloved candidate went onstage to concede defeat, we listened and cheered. No one heard him scream.
A couple of days later, exhausted Iowa staff began to arrive in New Mexico. I remember a car load arriving at midnight, and before they could take off their winter coats, I bombarded them with questions: "What happened?" I wanted to know. The consensus seemed to be that they were outplayed and outmaneuvered. Inexperienced volunteers and caucus goers didn't know what to do when precinct workers started trading supporters, working out deals for viability.
This was the first I'd heard that the Iowa caucuses weren't democratic, one-vote-one-person contests. We'd been too busy preparing for our own caucus, which was more like a primary, to bother trying to figure out how other states counted their votes.
In Iowa, voters don't elect a Democratic nominee; they instead elect a slate of delegates. And each precinct is awarded a certain number of delegates based on previous turnout. Unprecedented turnout in any precinct doesn't earn your candidate any more delegates than if only 20 people turn up. In addition, if your candidate doesn't have 15%, he or she gets no delegates at all, meaning those without this viability threshold swing their support—strategically—to another candidate. This is what had happened when Kucinich—whose supporters might naturally have leaned toward Dean as the anti-war candidate—instead tossed his supporters at Edwards, who had voted for the Iraq war.
Other irregularities went on too, and over the next two weeks we heard stories of dirty, behind-the-scenes campaigning never meant to see the light of day. Midnight "phonebanking" calls, professing to be from a rival campaign. Push polls asking if the voter knew that "Candidate X does (insert particularly heinous rumor here)." And of course, all the while the media was running non-stop the footage of Howard Dean's infamous scream, which our people there in the room at the time insisted was no louder than it needed to be—the din, they said, was incredible.
Dean never recovered. In Iowa, we heard in hushed whispers, he'd spent 20 million of the 40 million he'd raised, an unprecedented amount up to then, and there wasn't enough left to even pay all the staff.
Our dreams of attending a People's Inauguration party in Washington were nothing more than fantasies, we realized with sinking hearts. Our hopes of changing the country, of kicking out the lobbyists and D.C. insiders and the Texas oilmen who'd claimed our White House, were dashed that night in Iowa. By the time our own caucus ended with similar results, there was little left of what had been one of the greatest grassroots campaigns ever.
Iowa, that frozen Midwestern state that seems so democratic, so unfailingly fair, so nice, still haunts me. I can't bring myself to stay up to watch the returns tonight. I plan to sleep with a pillow over my head, humming to myself if I accidentally wake up, so I don't hear a word.
Someone let me know how it turns out, about six months from now.
