Report from the Saylor Township, Iowa Precinct 1 Republican caucus

Yesterday, I participated in my ninth Iowa presidential caucus. Since I'd moved since the last one, it was a new place with a new bunch of people to get to know.

I headed over to Romney headquarters on Ingersoll yesterday afternoon in an apprehensive mood. I'd been contacted- sometimes eight or nine times- by every single candidate contesting Iowa except Mitt Romney.

Perhaps, I told myself, that was because the Romney campaign already had my name. But the ground game in Iowa- as elsewhere- consists for the most part in making sure your identified supporters get to the polls (or, in this case, the caucus site). Since I live in an apartment on the opposite side of the street that defines Des Moines' northern city limit, I wasn't really sure about the geography of Saylor Township. The county party had contacted me about serving as our precinct's temporary chair. They changed their mind when they realized that I would have a hard time getting there, since I lived something like seven miles from the caucus site and didn't have a car. In addition to doing a few hours on the phones before going to the caucus, I was hoping to find a ride to my caucus site while I was at Romney headquarters.

They weren't sure, at first, that they could help. I was incredulous. Here was a voter coming in off the street and asking for the chance to vote for their candidate, and they weren't sure that they could get him to the caucus site! As the afternoon wore on, and I had a chance to talk to other volunteers, I realized that the Romney campaign really had no organized effort to get elderly or otherwise inconvenienced voters to the caucuses at all. This was bad; Ron Paul's organization was said to be uniquely ready for the ground game. The problem was that whereas the demographics of the Paul supporters tended toward younger voters (less experienced, less informed, and thus more likely to be Paul supporters in the first place), Romney supporters tended to be older folks- precisely the kind of people who might well need a ride to the polls.

I, and most of those sitting near me, were calling people in Dubuque, where I had gone to seminary. I actually recognized a couple of the names on the precinct lists, and I could actually visualize that caucus sites to which I was directing those voters I could identify as Romney supporters.. But sure enough: over and over again, the people we talked to kept saying, "I'm for Romney, but I won't be going to the caucus. I just can't get there." And there was nothing we could tell them.

I finally understood something of the reason late that night, when Gov. Romney gave his victory statement. In 2008, the Romney campaign had been loaded for bear in Iowa. It had 52 paid staff members in the state. It was as well organized as a caucus campaign in this state can be. It hadn't helped. Mike Huckabee, with nothing like the Romney organization, had come from nowhere to steal Mitt's thunder and win the caucuses. This year, the Romney campaign had a grand total of five paid staff members in the state. They were spreading their resources more thinly, unsure at first of how much of a shot they had in Iowa and not willing to repeat their 2008 mistake of depriving themselves of resources elsewhere by indulging in overkill in Iowa. But even now, I have to wonder whether last night's result would have been so close if Romney had put together a credible ground game and gotten all those old folks to their caucuses. Or even a good share of them.

Gov. Romney's sons stopped by and gave us a pep talk. Since I didn't go to the victory party at the Hotel Fort Des Moines (lacking a car in a town where the buses stop running at a quarter to nine at night, I wasn't sure how I was going to be able to get home- and besides, I was coming down with a headache), I never did get to see Romney himself in person. Nor, oddly, did I see any of the other candidates in person this year. Usually you have to walk carefully, or you'll step on one.

One reason was that, for the first time, everybody but Rick Santorum (and in the late stages, Michele Bachman) downplayed the very kind of individualized, person-to-person, town-to-town campaign which has always allowed Iowans to serve as surrogates for the rest of the country in taking a close, personal look at the candidates, asking them about the things that were on their own minds, and generally taking their measure.

This time, the campaign was waged wholesale rather than retail. In other words, it was run as it would have been elsewhere. Rather than personal contact between candidate and voter, television ads were its main thrust. Robocalls drove Iowans mad; both at the headquarters and later at the caucus site, people discussed how joked about how irritated they'd become by the ten or fifteen automated phone calls per day they were getting from various campaigns there toward the end.

A lawyer working for the Romney campaign finally offered me a ride to the caucus site at Cornell School. We agreed that I could probably catch a ride home from one of my fellow caucusers. Before leaving, I asked whether there were signs or something I could take to the site. I was told to take a window poster or two; there would be an assigned Romney speaker assigned to the precinct who would handle the rest.

As it turned out, there wasn't.

We had a terrible time finding Cornell School, a problem which I soon learned most of the participants who werent' from the area immediately surrounding the school had shared.

I was one of the first to arrive. The caucus- our precinct actually had its own room this year- took place in the school library. I put the Romney signs I'd brought against a couple of chairs in the back. Unlike 2008, when the room had been covered with candidate posters and yard signs lined the path to the building where our caucus was being held, there was not a single sign for any other candidate anywhere. I was gratified to see that one of my suggestions from 2008 had been adopted: actual ballots of a kind had been prepared for us to write on with the state party's logo on them. In 2008, I had been flabbergasted when our caucus chair had simply torn up some pages from a legal pad for us to use as ballots. Not that I suspected that any monkey business was going on, but especially in a room as crowded as that one was this seemed to me an open invitation to fraud. I introduced a resolution memorializing the state party to provide actual ballots in 2012. Evidently I wasn't the only one who saw the problem. Each of us was handed a yellow ballot as our names were checked off the voters' list.

Slowly, the caucusgoers drifted in. One was wearning a Ron Paul hat. His wife, I later saw, had a Paul sticker on her blouse. No other buttons or badges of any kind were visible, though the chair was wearing a Paul T-shirt under her coat (I could barely read the top line of it).

That lady was someone I was vaguely familiar with from past county and state conventions. She was a long-time Ron Paul supporter, who- like many Paulistas- seemed to be something of a political innocent (more on that in a moment). She was, however, a very nice and very competent person who did a fine job of running the caucus.

One of the caucusers circulated a nominating petition for Congressman Tom Latham, whose district was being combined with ours and who would be running against our congressman, Democrat Leonard Boswell, this year. We visited for a while while we waited for seven o'clock to roll around.

Precisely on the hour, we began. Pro forma, the temporary chair was elected permanent chair. There was no pledge of allegiance this year, probably because the library lacked a flag. The chair read a message from the state party asking for money, and the chair passed what in past years had been known as "the buck bag," but had now been rechristened "the Lincoln bag" after the image of our sixteenth president it bore.

The chair then asked if anybody had a statement to make on behalf of any of the candidates. Nobody moved. Realizing that nobody was going to, I raised my hand.

Barack Obama, I told the group, had to be beaten. The country could not afford four more years of indecisiveness, groveling before our enemies, and economic ineptitude. But, I continued, if Mr. Obama was going to be beaten, one thing had to be clearly understood: whether we wanted to acknowledge it or not, Mitt Romney was the only candidate who had a chance of doing so.

If we're going to win, I said, we're going to have to win over a whole lot of people who voted for Obama the last time. Among independents, I pointed out, the polls showed that every one of the other Republican candidates consistently had a negative rating from a majority of independents polled. Romney was the one exception; in the last poll I'd seen, independents had given him a 53% favorable rating.

And the last poll I'd seen, I continued, bore some statistics they needed to bear in mind when making their choice: Romney 46, Obama 39. Every other Republican candidate lost his or her trial heat with Mr. Obama in the same poll by between seven and 15 points. Other candidates, like Gingrich and Cain, had briefly lead Obama in some poll or other at some point. But they had quickly fallen back behind. Romney, on the other hand, had consistently run a stronger race against Obama than any of the others, and by a similarly decisive margin, ever since the pollsters had started doing such hypothetical match ups. There was simply no reasonable question but that Mitt Romney was our strongest potential nominee.

Mitt Romney, I explained, was a businessman with a record of turning around concerns in trouble. He was the one who had saved the Salt Lake City Olympics. When he was elected governor of Massachusetts, the state had a three billion dollar deficit; when he left office, it had a three billion dollar surplus- all achieved without raising taxes. Romney, I said, understood how the economy worked, how to get it moving again, and how to generate jobs. He had a record of success and credentials in these areas like no other candidate. And unlike the other candidates, he was electable.

I explained that I didn't agree with everything that Romney had done. He did, I admitted, institute the state program on which Obamacare was modeled. But the key word word, I pointed out, was state. The Tenth Amendment made many things appropriate for states which were not appropriate for the Federal government. Personally, I said, I opposed mandates even at the state level, and if Romney were running for governor of Iowa, I would have a bone to pick with him on that point. But he wasn't, I pointed out. He was running for president of the United States- and he had always and consistently opposed health care programs run by the Federal government.

I could see myself voting, I said, for all but one of the candidates before the caucus (I was referring to Ron Paul as the exception, but did not identify him). Those candidates agreed on many issues. But only Mitt Romney could actually do anything about them, because only he could win.

I had made up my mind to be careful in my criticism of Paul, despite my conviction that at least half of his Iowa support this year came from people unacquainted with the squirrelier aspects of his record and positions. As negative as the ads were this year, Iowans are nice people who don't like negativity, and are as apt as not to punish it. So I concluded with a strategically veiled reference to Paul, counting on a commercial that had aired in the closing days of the campaign to identify him. It concerned a hot button issue here in Iowa.

All the candidates except one, I pointed out, agreed that the law can and should define the parameters of the institution of marriage because it was not merely a contract between two people. It affected their children, their neighbors, and everyone. Mitt Romney agrees that marriage should be traditionally defined, and protected as traditionally defined by the government.

I was politely applauded. Then the chair gave her brief pitch for Paul, whom she said she'd caucused for in 2008. All of the candidates , she said, now seemed to have come around to what Paul had been saying all along.

I bit my tongue.

He'd been elected several times to Congress, she said, which proved his electability. Hence my earlier comment about her political naivette.

He understood economics, and was a generally nice person, and she felt strongly that he should be president. And he was consistent.

For some reason, Simon and Garfunkel's Still Crazy After All These Years floated through my head.

He had, she concluded, voted against every unbalanced budget since he'd been in Congress.

I decided not to reply. After all, I didn't know the makeup of the precinct. The trend had been toward Romney and Santorum, and I thought the potential downside of laying into Paul's foreign policy was probably higher than the upside. And besides- at least she hadn't argued that Paul would stop the United States from being merged into Canada and Mexico, or prevent the government from issuing each of us bar codes which would be the Mark of the Beast mentioned in Revelation. The Paul spokesman in my precinct had made both of those claims in 2008.

Then we voted. Tellers were appointed, the ballots were collected, and those cast for each candidate were put on seperate folding chairs as they were opened. At this point, a man walked in who, strictly speaking, should have been asked to leave, since he had arrived after the caucus began. Nevertheless he was allowed to cast his vote. Nobody objected.

When the vote was announced, I cringed:

Paul 10
Bachmann 6
Perry 5
Romney 5
Santorum 3
Gingrich 0

There is a price to be paid for speaking at a public meeting, and I then paid it, being drafted to represent our precinct on the Polk County Republican Central Committee. The lady who had passed around the Latham petition was coerced into representing us at the county convention- a privilege of dubious value, for which one must pay $30 and put up with a whole lot of entirely absurd and pointless wrangling and nonsense which is apt to leave one asking existential questions, like "Why am I here?"

A motion introduced by a retired National Guard member to memorialize the county and state platform committees to oppose any change in the way military pensions are handled (apparently a change has been proposed which is extremely unpopular with the rank-and-file) was introduced, seconded, and passed. The chair asked for a motion to adjourn.

I glanced at my watch, and saw that it was only 7:30. Incredibly, we had gotten the whole caucus over and done with in half an hour- a labor which Hercules could not have accomplished. I moved that the chair be congratulated on her stellar performance. The motion was passed by acclamation, and we adjourned.

I asked about a ride home. It turned out that two of the people- the retired National Guardswoman and the lady with the Latham petition- lived within a few blocks of me. On the way out, I said, "Ron Paul scares the living daylights out of me." The lady with the Latham petition nodded vigorously. "Me, too," she said.

"Why?," the former Guard member asked. "Well," I said, " a few days after 9/11, he got up on the floor of the House and said that the only reason we were attacked was that we were mean enough to have stationed our troops in al Quaeda's back yard, and that hurt their feelings. He wants to know how we would feel if some Arab country had troops near us. In other words, he blames America for 9/11."

Her jaw dropped.

"That's essentially the cornerstone of his foreign policy," I continued. "He thinks that the only reason we have enemies in the world is that big, bad, mean America picks on them, and that if we'd just stay home and behave everything would be peachy. He even thinks we shouldn't be upset about Iran getting nuclear weapons. He says it isn't our business. Of course, based on what he says about 9/11, if terrorists nuked Chicago with an Iranian bomb, I suppose he'd make excuses for them, too."

She shook her head.

"And then, there's the matter of the newsletter," I continued. "For ten years, he paid for and published a newsletter under his name with the cooperation of some of the rankest, scuzziest white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, and other bigoted slime you can name. It urged people to be ready for the coming race war, and ran some of the most disgustingly racist nonsense you can imagine. It even suggested that George W. Bush may have conspired with al Queda to bring about 9/11. Paul himself, though, has only said that there needs to be a new investigation into 9/11, and hoped that a more truthful one would have been conducted once the Democrats took office."

She shook her head again.

"However, he claims that he shouldn't be held responsible, because he disagrees with all that stuff, and besides, he- a public figure- paid for and profitted from that newsletter that was published under his name without knowing what was in it."

"If he published it and paid for it," she said, "then he's responsible for what's in it."

I shrugged. "Well," I said," he disagrees- and gets very angry with people who agree with you. For my part, even if he's telling the truth, I think anyone with judgment poor enough to publish and pay for and profit from a newsletter published under his own name for ten years, hire a whacked-out extremist to edit it, and then not pay attention to it and not notice for an decade what was in it would prove himself unqualified to be dogcatcher, much less president. In fact, I'm amazed that anyone who would admit to that would have the gall to be a candidate."

She agreed.

I should say that she herself had not been one of those who voted for Paul. But still, her response fills me with the conviction that there is hope for Iowa, and even for my precinct.

Even in Iowa, should Paul ever be a serious threat to other candidates in, say, 2016, they'll do to him what they did to each other this year, and what Paul himself did to them: they'll run negative ads actually informing Iowans about Paul, and hel'll be finished.

From what I hear, Newt is going to take him on with regard to these matters in New Hampshire. It's about time somebody did. Folks in Iowa are so sick of the whole mess that they probably won't listen. But maybe the news will even filter down to Saylor Township, Precinct 1.