Feb. 20, 2007
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa -- This week, the New York Times had an article about presidential campaigning in this state, with the headline "In Iowa, the Living Room Has Fallen Out of Favor."
It suggested the intimate gatherings that once defined Iowa's political events have yielded to the big rooms, with bigger crowds and bigger press corps.
It's true, as the Times story mentioned, that Hillary Clinton spoke to a few thousand Iowans in Des Moines and Davenport a few weekends ago, and Barack Obama attracted four-digit crowds in Cedar Rapids and Ames. John McCain and John Edwards campaigned in hotel ballrooms, not private living rooms, in Iowa last weekend. But most who will attend Iowa's presidential caucuses next January probably remain picky shoppers, not impulse buyers. They still want to see candidates' body language up close, get gut-feelings about these people who seek their support.
So it was this night in a Cedar Rapids pub and grill called the Irish Democrat. "That's a redundant title to a bar," joked Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, who is both Irish and a Democrat, and happens to be running for president.
Appropriately wearing a green necktie, Dodd met about 50 people in the bar, most of them Linn County Democrats who stopped in to meet the senator. There was no stump speech, just hand-shaking and back-patting, introducing himself to people one and two at a time. After Obama had filled a high school gym here and McCain packed a ballroom in a downtown hotel within the last two weeks, a presidential campaign stop in Cedar Rapids resembled most of the hundreds that had come to this city over the last few decades. It was small-scale, personal, and not accompanied by a glut of national media.
Which means one thing: Dodd, 62, is a dark horse in the Democratic field, out of the bright light cast by Clinton, Obama and Edwards. He insists he isn't a bit disheartened by it. Maybe that's because he could be more able to easily move about Iowa and meet more of its potential voters than the aforementioned trio.
"I believe in retail politics," Dodd said. "When I first ran for Congress there were 60 towns in the Congressional district. We debated each other 60 times. Sometimes there were more candidates in the room than there was an audience.
"If there were not an Iowa or New Hampshire, I'd be out here having a beer with you at the Irish Democrat, but I wouldn't be a candidate. Because it wouldn't be possible for me to be one. This state allows me to take my 26 years of experience in the United States Senate that involved every major foreign policy debate, authored almost every piece of major legislation involving families and children in the last 25 years, as well as was a major force on the financial services area, to be heard.''
But this wasn't a night for sounding like a policy wonk. Facing a wall that featured photos of John and Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Jimmy Carter and Tip O'Neill, Dodd went from table to table in the Irish Democrat to try to warm strangers to an Irish Democrat most of them knew little about.
"I'd be happy to have a thousand people show up,'' Dodd said. "But I know it's an essential liability for (Clinton and Obama) in a way. Because Iowans don't just want to go to a rally. They want to sit down and look you in the eye. It's almost a physical process.
"They do something here that I've always thought is so important, I don't care what office you're running for. It's a question voters ask candidates that is never articulated directly. Too many people in public life think campaigns are about them. Campaigns are rarely about the candidate. They're about the voter. That sounds cute, what do you mean by that? I mean the following:
"You may ask me a question as a voter. The question you're really asking me, particularly the first time we meet, is 'Are you listening to me? Are you paying attention to me? Do you know what I'm going through? Do you have any idea what it's like to lose your job? Senator, do you have any idea what that's like?' That's what you're asking me. If I don't answer that question or series of questions formatively for you, you never get to my eight-point program on energy, or health care.
"Don't misunderstand me. If I don't have answers on the intellectual side, I'm not suggesting you can get away with that. But frankly, this is a far more primal exercise than it is an intellectual one. It becomes intellectual."
This day for Dodd included meeting about 50 people at an Iowa City coffee shop, touring a Johnson County neighborhood center, meeting with an IBEW council in Cedar Rapids, and stopping in a Cedar Rapids pub where many a presidential candidate has wandered through over the years. It was a lot of "Are you listening to me?"
"I've often said if I could have one thing said about me at the end of my public life, it would be the great anecdote about old FDR,'' said Dodd. "His casket is going down Pennsylvania Avenue in April of 1945. A reporter is interviewing the crowd about their recollections of him. Some guy seemed to be grief-stricken more than the rest. The reporter says, 'You must have known Franklin Roosevelt.' He said they never met. "So why do you seem more grief-stricken than the rest?' He said 'I didn't know him, he knew me.' I remember hearing that 30 years ago and thinking what an incredible thing to say about someone.
"To me, that's really what goes on in Iowa and New Hampshire. People ask that question 'Do you know who I am?' "
With 11 months left until Iowa's caucuses, Dodd can answer it many times. He'll probably do it in a living room or two along the way.