by Simon Schama
The Democrats know that ultimately it’s not enough to stand back while trying to wipe the smile off their faces and exclaiming “it wasn’t us” and just cash in on the grief (though for the moment it would do nicely). Like the Republicans they felt the sea change and like them they were (and are) unsure, ideologically, which way to tack to catch the tide. But they began to speak less defensively about the integrity of public service, about recovering a sense of community in America, about a version of the nation’s history and its present condition that had somehow got hidden away during the long paramountcy of raw individualism.
Sometimes, it seems to me that, for its own good, we should retire the word “narrative”—from graduate student courses, political analysts, image-doctors, from anyone who doesn’t actually narrate. But perhaps, not just yet. Waiting out there to be recounted are competing histories of the United States. My hunch is that it’s the most compelling storyteller, the best historian, who will be raising her or his hand beside the chief justice of the Supreme Court, come January 2009. But then I would think that, wouldn’t I?
The story the Candidate was telling the well-dressed and coiffed lunchtime Republican crowd on caucus day at Kum & Go Corporate HQ (good modern art, even better coffee) was his own, since the default strategy of modern political campaigning requires that the biopic be the platform. “I am America,” this line goes, “I am you” or rather “the you you want to be and the America you want to see, am I not?”
Mitt Romney needed a story in the worst way since the alternative was to have others do it for him, and then inevitably it would be about his Mormonism. But Mitt had precisely the narrative antidote to dispel suspicions, namely that of the hardheaded but warmhearted entrepreneur specializing in turnarounds (the Winter Olympics, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) while fathering prolific, uniformly handsome boys, all of whom had gone on to do their own fathering, resulting in the impossibly cute infants who were scooped up into the arms of Grandpa Mitt on stage and who, while looking momentarily shocked as if suddenly deprived of ice cream for no good reason they could figure out, managed nonetheless not to burst into tears. Either that was a real miracle, or else the ice cream was backstage. But you couldn’t not like Grandpa, so sensationally buff for America. The lustrous crest rose darkly from his crown; the orthodontically immaculate smile flashed; the belted waistline advertised exemplary trimness; the sleeves were rolled up, ready for—what, precisely? Opening his own limo door? Romney spoke with self-deprecating charm and in whole sentences, a winning combination, especially in Des Moines, which is a culturally tony state capital. He even dared to quote before the Republican crowd the Harvard historian David Landes, whom he suspected (wrongly, except in the Gladstonian sense) of being a classic liberal but whose unexceptional nostrum that political cultures made economies, not the other way around, Romney thought just the ticket. His own culture was all eager enterprise, and as if in demonstration Romney moved around the dais in an economic, pigeon-toed shuffle that said “let me get AT it.” Behind him the wide Tribe of Romney seemed to have mysteriously multiplied into yet more immaculate blondes and babies even while the rally had been proceeding, so that Mitt’s turning circle seemed to be getting ever more confined until finally he seemed to be spinning in the Iowa waltz all on his own. Shuffle shuffle, turn, lean into audience, beam…
Iowa, Iowa, winter spring summer and fall.
Come and see. Come dance with me
To the beeootiful Iowa waltz.
The crowd ate it and him up. He was their Man. He was the future. He was America. In the throng I asked the two sons (aged twelve and fourteen) of Kristin, a professor at Boston University, what they most wanted to see a President Romney secure for the American future, and they replied with frightening promptness and certainty, “Oh a balanced budget.” You can see their point, even though cutting taxes to the bone as the candidate recommended didn’t seem, in the short term, the best way to reach that goal. But let Ryan and Scott loose on the populace, I thought, and the Hairdo is home and dry.
“IF THE PEOPLE ARE DISINTERESTED, MOVE ON!” said the notice Scotch-taped to the wall at Hillary HQ as guidance for door-to-door canvassers. As it was by now clear that Des Moines is an intellectually strenuous place, the helpful professor in me felt compelled to point out how this “un/dis” confusion might leave the campaign open to unfortunate misinterpretation; mean-spirited souls gleefully seizing on Clinton links to sundry interest groups. So I said something, in a polite, smirk-free way. The disinterested advice was not welcomed. “Oh,” said the campaign captain, eyes narrowing a little behind the steel frames, a faint but perceptible sigh of disgust moving through her sweater. “We’ve already discussed this, you know, and the dictionary says EITHER…?” She gave me the rising inflection, high-school style, but this wasn’t a question. Somewhere within me the pedant made a bleat of protest and retreated.
Four in the afternoon and precise dictionary definitions were not high on the agenda down at Clinton Command and Control. The hours, minutes were speeding by, and there were bodies to get out into the chill and off to the caucuses, all 1,700 of them right across the state; a transport fleet to mobilize; basic democracy enabled by Jeep Cherokees and Volkswagens. Alexis de Tocqueville would have loved it. The one-story cinderblock building was divided into two long, narrow rooms, both of them supplied with low trestle tables, half-drunk cans of Diet Pepsi, and volunteers, most but not all of them women: student sweats and designer-label jeans; the glint of a golden scrunchy holding back glossy hair. Many of these women, elated at the prospect of a Madame President, had flown in from Beverly Hills, Connecticut, and the fancier suburbs of Chicago (where they had already networked and raised money for Hillary), and in turn got to meet her when she arrived to turn on the inspiration faucet, which, especially in a room of fifty or so, she can certainly do. The smile is authentic, the eye contact unforced, the listening attentive. I’ve seen it in operation, and, believe me, it makes believers.
But there was not much sign of the candidate’s magnetism in the Hillary hut as light drained from the Des Moines afternoon. Not even much in the way of pictures on the walls; save a few small photos of the Candidate in schoolrooms and diners along with volunteers and senior citizens trying to look pleased at their Early Bird dinner interrupted by the campaign. What there was was last-minute toil—phone numbers crossed off, map locations checked—and a camera crew bumping into the labor with cables and mike booms, so under the circumstances it wasn’t surprising that we got the cold shoulder. I would have felt much the same way. Name-dropping the BBC didn’t melt the ice much either. A tall Asian American woman from Chicago, leaning against the wall elegantly earringed, legs snugly fitted into dark and shiny boots that seemed unmarked by the Des Moines frozen crud, surveyed me with amused disdain as if congratulating me on getting access to what, already, she made clear, she thought was the victorious nominee’s campaign. Not everyone was quite so cocksure. “How do you think you’re doing?” I asked the curly-haired, pale-faced young man who was running the press end of the campaign and who was entirely free from the expression of unearned self-congratulation that had sat on the face of Chicago Earrings. “Oh,” he said, flashing a winning but rueful grin, “pretty well.” But it was the prolonged pause that accompanied the continuing smile that gave the sense that there was indeed nothing more to be said, nor a whole lot more to be done. Nathan was at pains not to give the impression that it was all wrapped up. But nor did he think it was unwrapped, either.
Leaving the Hillary HQ I bumped into Lanny Davis, whom I’d seen working the phone banks in Room 2. Lanny was the epitome of Clinton loyalism through thick and thin, and the challenges he’d faced as counsel, apologist, advocate, had often come very thick. His Rodham-Clinton history went all the way back to Yale Law School where he’d first met Hillary, and looking at him powering his way through the phone calls, burrowing through the number list like a mole on speed, he seemed to be in love with her. Images flashed up
of the rejected nerd while a mane of Arkansas hair and a world-conquering smile bore down on Hillary in the Law School Library. All these years had gone past, and Lanny still wanted to be Hillary’s knight valiant, Sir Lanny of the Inextinguishable Lamp. He had written a book called Scandal: How Gotcha Politics Is Destroying America, which reflected, in a wounded kind of way, on the years when conservative pitbulls tried to bring Bill Clinton down for his ideological as well as personal libertinism, not to mention an elastic way with sworn testimony, thereby inflicting hurt on effective presidential governance. After eight years of un-Clintonian incompetence, Lanny was looking forward to an era of New Politics: all high-minded debate on the Issues. Sure, I mused as I watched him drive the mobilization machinery. Let’s see.
At the doorway he stuck out a friendly paw and introduced himself. As it happens, what Lanny wanted to talk to me about as he put on his lawyer’s overcoat and faced the cold was…history; not the history he was hoping to make that evening but some of the stuff I had written. Rembrandt, Robespierre, Churchill. Lanny Davis, perpetual graduate student, wanted a curbside seminar worse than another Diet Pepsi. Or was this the old Clinton flattery engine thrumming away? I had had the same experience, more than once, with Bill, the urgent inquiry into my work as if it were way more important than, say, tackling fundamentalists or the national debt. For a moment, confronted with the slightly blinking Lanny, him needing so badly to know about Caravaggio, I had the same warm rush of indecent egotism followed by shame and disbelief. And, just like his Master of the White House, before one had time to take a cold shower and snap out of it, Lanny was gone. There were platoons of old ladies to be introduced to Volkswagens, much work to be done before he could call it a night, and he was making his way into the parking lot, polished Oxfords stepping gingerly between the treacherous spots of black ice.
Beyond, in the Des Moines gloaming, the gusts had turned bone-cuttingly bitter. The lonely apostle of Ron Paul had given up the unequal struggle against the elements and was folding his banner into the back of a grimy truck. Dead leaves blew over the sidewalk, keeping company with jettisoned fast-food packaging, bowling down the frost-buckled flagstones like tumbleweed in spring.
Darkness brought a quickening pulse of commuting traffic. Every so often a trailer, carrying a satellite dish on its roof, would rumble by heading toward the downtown media center. But that would have happened in any year, with any lineup of candidates. That was media business as usual. So I did my best to contain a sense of theatrical anticipation. Maybe this sense I had of an American rebirth was just so much wishful thinking.
And there was not much about the caucus location that shouted “HISTORY!” The high school was named for Theodore Roosevelt. But the welcome sign, bucking bronco and waved Stetson, an allusion to Teddy’s early life as Rough Rider, seemed more John Wayne, whose birthplace was in De Soto, a few miles out of town. The building was grandly old-fashioned; not the cinder block and glass constructions that sat squatly all over the American suburban landscape, but a school built of solid brick. Inside the ceilings were high; the long wood-paneled corridors were wide and smelled of floor wax. Three caucuses, two Democratic and one Republican, were meeting here, at around seven. It was six, and not a whole lot was going on in the room assigned to Precinct 53. A few tables set out with the campaign literature of each of the candidates, some of them staffed, some not; other tables with party registration forms for newcomers to fill out instantly qualifying them for the vote. Most of the action, predictably, was from television people setting up their cameras on legs pointing toward the front of the room. By 6:25, people had begun to trickle in from their offices, homes, and dinners; most of them elderly, all of them white.
Five, ten minutes later, the scene had changed. The trickle had become a stream which had become a flood, as if entire busloads of voters had suddenly pulled into the parking lot. The dozing schoolroom turned into a midwestern political souk, with champions of the candidates buttonholing voters, sitting the Uncommitted down to persuade them to their camp. In they came; a few not so white; all ages including families with small children wearing campaign T-shirts. Drawing paper and crayons had been set out on tables against the walls; some of the kids got stuck making pictures while cooler older brothers and sisters thumb-twiddled Game Boys. The place filled with talk of the war, of health care, and comradely abuse of the Bush administration and all it had wrought. (Down the corridor in the Republican caucus, there was less interest in defending the president and more in the competing styles of the contenders for his succession: the down-home intelligent candor of Mike Huckabee, the evangelical Baptist pastor whom, for some reason, the conservative powers that be suspected of closet liberalism, and the more corporate sleekness of Mitt Romney.)
By 6:45, there were no seats left in Precinct 53 and no standing room either and people were still pouring through the doors. The registration table had run out of forms, and they were being filled as fast as they could be photocopied in the school office. Party regulars came up to me shaking their heads in happy disbelief. They had never seen anything like it. A caucus that in 2004 had tallied around eighty would this time probably count three or four hundred, a pattern that would be repeated all over Iowa and all through the country as the primary season continued. Most of those I spoke to had never been to a caucus before; many of them were Independents, and all of them felt this was a year to make their voice heard. And because voting precincts were simply the political expression of residential districts, they were all neighbors, even if this was the first time they had encountered each other. They used the same stores, their children went to the same schools, they shared pews in the local churches and synagogues, and now they evidently felt joined together in an act of common citizenship.
Though the caucus nominating system was a modern invention, its roots were old and deep in American soil. Even before the revolution, the historian Sean Wilentz has noted, rowdy societies of artisans and mechanics were defying the choice of people presuming to be their betters by voting for their own nominees to city councils. Those undeferential habits would persist, eventually spawning the republican societies that made Jeffersonian democracy possible. By the 1830s, the habit of local choices and votes had moved from unruly cities into the world of the frontier. Even before it had become a state in the mid-nineteenth century, Iowa had had these kinds of local meetings in which the market and the hustings mingled together. Into town on their carts and wagons came farmers and blacksmiths with book learning, small-town lawyers who had ambitions, looking over the political wares on offer as shrewdly as the hogs and horses. Amid the traveling quacks, preachers, hot-pie stalls, people having their teeth pulled and their beards shaved, folks got to sound off about what ailed them. Bands would play, opponents get roundly vilified; one hero of the Mexican War sung to the skies, another jeered and laughed. Toughs would be on the lookout for suckers to drink or to beat into loyalty. It was frontier democracy, raucous and unruly, and it either exhilarated or horrified visiting Europeans.
Long ago there had also probably been ceremonious blowhards in beaver felt hats who liked nothing better than to Take Charge. Inevitably, then, the retired (though unhatted) schoolteacher, union organizer, and local party notable, a small, long-winded man, Jim Sutton, attempted to have the caucus Settle Down by delivering a lecture to the newcomers on Iowa’s just claims to be the first state in the nation to deliver a judgment on the candidates. Iowa, he intoned, had never had a war. Canadian troopers had not, apparently, been tempted to pour across the frontier (though asking the Native American tribes might have produced a different assumption). And Iowa was, he went on, “just about in the middle of everything”—demographically, politically…and so on. One of the pleasures of the Democratic caucuses in Iowa was their freedom from having to listen to speeches. The assumption was that candidates’ positions were already well known, and in case they were not, they were set out in the printed flyers that greeted people coming into the room. But no one ha
d anticipated Jim and his teacherly enthusiasm. By the time that he was characterizing Iowa as America’s Switzerland (minus the Alps), and proceeding with a comparative analysis, a certain restlessness was becoming audible, that could, I thought, if Jim went on, say, to comparisons with federal systems in Canada or Belgium, turn into an ugly scene, perhaps a lynch mob, even among the preternaturally good-natured citizens of Des Moines. He paid the price. A motion was made to replace Jim (pro tem chair) with an actual chair. Jim civically volunteered to replace himself with himself. This didn’t go down well. Desperate, others put themselves forward, and although he demanded a recount as multitudes of hands waved to the ceiling, Jim, wearing an expression of baffled resignation, conceded, and the caucus proper, at last, was on.
At seven the doors were shut, ramping up the excited sense of expectation among the packed crowd. They were now suspended in a chamber of decision; a tiny but discrete atom in the organism of American democracy that would, ten months later, issue forth a new power. They felt the moment: Jewish grannies; teenage students; businesswomen and doctors. America. Each “preference” group identified with the candidates had been assigned a station in the room like school teams: Clinton in the right-hand corner, Obama in the left, Bill Richardson and John Edwards in the back two corners; the Rest (Biden, Kucinich, Dodd) in more amorphously defined positions. In the dead center of the room a hole was to be opened (somehow) into which the Undecideds would move, so that they could be lobbied by Persuaders from each and any of the camps toward which they might be leaning. There would be an initial count of bodies, then the Undecideds and those who had committed to candidates who were deemed to have unviable numbers would redistribute themselves to the remaining leaders. Compared to the relatively anonymous business of dropping papers into the slot of a ballot box or pulling a lever behind a curtain, and compared to the low-temperature habits of voting in Britain, the process was startlingly direct; face-to-face; voices raised, hands shaken, heads nodded in assent or dissent. It was thrilling, and the serious business hadn’t even really begun.
