Tag Archive: Yale on the Trail: Iowa

  1. Bill Clinton woos voters with reminiscence about 1990s

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    Bill ClintonAMANA, Iowa, 4:26 p.m. — Bill Clinton is 26 minutes late. He was supposed to arrive in Amana at 4 o’clock to address a crowd of bundled-up Iowans at this small outpost 10 miles off I-80. So now we’re sitting in this corrugated metal structure that gets a degree colder every time someone opens the door. A cluster of twenty-something Hillary staffers stand in the corner in ankle-length coats, clutching clipboards and looking around nervously. One of them clearly looks like D.C., but a couple others are wearing enough Carhartt to pass for native Iowans.

    Finally a voice breaks through an ambient Fleetwood Mac tune and announces the arrival of Chrissie Vilsack — the wife of former Governor Tom Vilsack — and President Clinton. The crowd rises to its feet.

    “I was watching the football games on the way over,” the former president begins. “And I was watching this kicker in the fourth quarter of the game and thinking, ‘That’s how the Iowa caucus-goers are going to feel on Thursday.’ On caucus night, the whole future of the world is on your shoulders — don’t feel any pressure at all.”

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  2. Students for Rudy co-chair touts ’50-state’ strategy

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    Jimmy CentersIOWA CITY, Iowa, 1:17 p.m. — “This is how we keep the volunteers in line,” Students for Rudy Giuliani National Co-Chair Jimmy Centers jokes as he fires a foam disk across the room. “Don’t take pictures of this.”

    Centers heads up one of a small handful of Republican presidential campaign offices east of Des Moines in the state of Iowa. He’s got a pile of walk lists on his desk that is six inches high, two long rows of identical cell phones for volunteers to use on the job and a bucket of foam shooters reminiscent of something you might pull out of a McDonald’s happy meal.

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  4. Edwards counting on rural counties in countdown to caucuses

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    Mike JuntunenIOWA CITY, Iowa, 11:33 a.m. — Mike Juntunen didn’t go home for Christmas. No, the 26-year-old University of Iowa freshman was busy spreading his own version of holiday cheer — the message of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards.

    Juntunen is co-president of the University of Iowa Hawkeyes for John Edwards, which is responsible in part for marshaling Edwards’ student forces in the Iowa City/Johnson County area and doing outreach to surrounding rural counties. He’s optimistic about the former senator’s chances on Thursday night.

    “A straight-up tie really means John Edwards wins Iowa by three or four points because that’s the proportion of the second-place votes we’re going to win,” he predicts.

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  5. “O”-mentum or no-mentum?

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    IOWA CITY, Iowa, 9:34 AM – The buzz across Iowa this morning is the new Des Moines Register poll released last night. Matt is on Barack Obama’s text message mailing list, so when the results of the poll were released, we found out that the Illinois Senator had pulled ahead to a 32-25-24 lead over Sen. Clinton and former Sen. Edwards. That’s significant – the Register is calling Obama’s gains “the largest lead of any of the Democratic candidates in the Register’s poll all year.”

    But Zogby International’s daily tracking poll isn’t showing any “O”-mentum. At least not yet: Zogby still puts Hillary in the lead at 30%, followed by Obama and Edwards at 26 and 25, respectively, in polling conducted between 12/28 and 12/31.

    There are discrepancies between the two polls on the Republican side as well, but nothing as dramatic – both polls put Huckabee at the top of the list, followed by Romney and McCain.

    We’re going to try to get some analysis here later. Check back soon.

    -Zack Abrahamson

  6. Bobby Gravitz ’05 and the Gitmo Room

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    DES MOINES, Iowa, 7:37 PM – “This is the main planning room,” Bobby Gravitz ’05 tells me as he sweeps his arm across a field of cubicles, half-eaten pizzas and young volunteers hunched over telephones. “Over on this side are most of the statewide directorial staff and over there is most of our Polk County field staff. Let’s try and find a place to sit down.”

    This proves difficult. All we really need for an interview is a table and chairs – ready fare for virtually any office in the state of Iowa. But this is a presidential campaign office. Why spend valuable campaign cash on chairs when an old Culligan bottle will do the trick?

    Bobby ends up leading us into a room affectionately called “The Gitmo Room.” (more…)

  7. At Obama’s Iowa HQ, a ‘swamp’ is born

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    The front door of Obama’s Des Moines headquartersDES MOINES, Iowa, 7:15 PM – The floor of Senator Barack Obama’s Des Moines Iowa headquarters is soaked. Two canvassers walk in wearing thick-soled North Face hiking boots and you can see drops of water press out of the carpet around the edges of each shoe. Each volunteer that has come in out of the light snow and slushy streets tracks a tiny bit of the dreaded Iowan “wintry mix” into the office until the floor feels like what one volunteer calls it from her desk, “It’s a swamp, really.”

    Matt Hasvold – an old high school buddy of mine who works for the South Dakota State University Collegian (www.sdsucollegian.com) – and I have been here two days now and have determined there are a number of minor inconveniences that come with the state of Iowa. One is the cold. You try to stand outside for 90 seconds to top off your gas tank and your fingers swell up like hot dogs when you return to the heat-blasted environs of your car. And we’re both from South Dakota. We know what it’s like to drive through zero-degree weather and shovel snow in sub-zero wind chill conditions. We can handle the cold.

    Sort of.

    -Zack Abrahamson

  8. Candidates pass over small-town Iowan Yalies

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    YALE, Iowa, 2:21 p.m. — George Dorr has been driving tractor trailers for 60 years – “Since I was twenty-something,” he says. Now six months into his retirement, he sits at a table at Just Ethel’s, the only café in the tiny burg of Yale, Iowa. His whole life, Dorr has been leaving this hamlet in Guthrie County loaded down and bound for big cities across the Midwest. But he always comes back. “If I were to leave town, there wouldn’t be nothin’ left,” he jokes. It’s an exaggeration — but just slightly.

    The 2000 census pegged the population of the town of Yale at 287. The town has one grocery store, one mechanic’s shop and one restaurant – Just Ethel’s – where owner Sue Movingo has been working for 10 years.

    “Not much exciting ever happens in Yale,” she says. Asked for a run-down of the community’s attractions, she leans up against a window of the café and points across the street to the grain elevator that towers above the town. “There’s the elevator, and the Raccoon River Valley Trail, and the round gym by the old school that we’re trying to fix up.”

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  9. Political junkies battle boredom, swap stories on back wall

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    PERRY, Iowa, 12:32 p.m. — The back wall of a political event is a little like a fraternity. Photographers and reporters lean against the wall, usually butting up against a candidate’s posters or signs, and swap stories. Did you hear the latest one about Biden? Who’s this joker doing Candidate X’s introduction? Weren’t you in Hawaii just two weeks ago, Jim?

    After the Obama event, photographer Matt Lucas and I were approached by a young man named Edward. Twenty-two years old, just graduated from Oxford in the United Kingdom. He’s been working for the Daily Telegraph – a major London-based paper – for a little over a month, now, and he is covering the American presidential primaries.

    “Yeah, I’m a little bit of a political junkie,” he admits. “But not quite as much as you two, eh?”

    We walked him through the basics of an American campaign event – Perry was the first stop on the trail for Edward – and how to accost (read: approach) an American voter politely. But as for how to fight off the boredom of hearing the same stump speech day after day, we had no answer.

    “I watched basically this same speech on C-SPAN last night,” Edward said of Obama’s pitch. Then, pointing at the row of tables reserved for the traveling campaign press – reporters from the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Atlanta Journal-Constitution — he asks, “These guys must hate it. Day after day – how do you find something new?”

    -Zack Abrahamson

  10. Rallying crowd with sense of urgency, Obama calls ’08 a ‘defining moment’

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    PERRY, Iowa, 12:10 p.m. — Perry, Iowa is a small town of 7,000 at the intersection of Iowa highways 141 and 144. The main drag – 2nd avenue – runs four blocks through the heart of town, lined with maybe a couple dozen storefronts. It is a sleepy little place 20 miles north of the interstate, northwest of the capital, Des Moines.

    But inside the McCreary Community Center on Pattee Street this morning, you would think you were standing on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange — or in the White House Press Room. Of the gymnasium that local organizers had converted into a stage, fully half the floor space was devoted to camera risers, media tables and TV boom microphones.

    Who would have thought Dick Cheney’s cousin could turn such a crowd?

    (more…)

  11. Obama hopes for Willie Mays, gets Dick Cheney

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    PERRY, Iowa, 12:10 PM – Perry, Iowa is a little town of 7,000 at the intersection of Iowa highways 141 and 144. The main drag – 2nd avenue – runs four blocks through the heart of town, lined with maybe a couple dozen storefronts. It is a sleepy little place twenty miles north of the interstate, northwest of the capital Des Moines.

    But inside the McCreary Community Center on Pattee Street this morning, you would think you were standing on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, or in the White House Press Room. Of the gymnasium area local organizers had converted into a stage, fully half the floor space was devoted camera risers, media tables, and TV boom microphones.

    Who would have thought Dick Cheney’s cousin could turn such a crowd?

    Yes, it was Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s turn to hold our attention. (more…)