The fields of paradox lie fallow. The winds have stripped the trees to barren branches, their leaves scattered in haphazard piles waiting for random gusts to rearrange them yet again. In snow-flecked rows amidst hump-backed hills and sleepy-watered creeks, the last leathery skins of dreams and debacles rattle ominously.
As rhythmic swells of the wind wash over the relics of the harvest, you may find yourself falling into a mythic trance where lost voices lie in the memory held by the land. A writer named W. P. Kinsella wrote a novel, Shoeless Joe, in which a farmer hearing a disembodied command plows under his ripening cornstalks to build a baseball diamond. “Is this heaven?” goes a famous line from the movie based on Kinsella’s novel, “No, it’s Iowa,” is the reply appropriated by local Chambers of Commerce.
The fields of paradox have a way of working on you as they did on Kinsella and the characters in his novel, especially during the frenzied period that happens every four years when satellite trucks sprouting gleaming metallic towers, motorhomes plastered with red, white and blue signs and nosy reporters whose microphones seem permanent appendages descend on the cornstalks like flocks of raucous crows. Just ask Howard Dean. He was the nominal front runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination before he came to Iowa, but not long after he left the state trailed by the sound of a corvine squawk, his campaign imploded. Or ask Hillary Clinton. She also lead in the polls but, like Dean, she misjudged Iowa, limped into New Hampshire and eventually lost the prize she thought lay in her grasp.
Every four years, in Iowa paradox grips the gray days of winter so the season where life lies enshrouded does not mark an ending, but the possibility of a new beginning as America remakes itself in a democratic metamorphosis. The attention of the world focuses intently on these fallow fields, waiting with the eagerness of a child to see the results of the transformation. And every four years, as if on cue, reporters, pundits and candidates call forth from the drying cornstalks not old-time baseball players, but long-dead Presidential contenders sporting frock coats, spats, top hats, a bow tie or two and one pair of leg braces. Although he was speaking about baseball, the biblical voice of James Earl Jones could have just as easily been evoking another American innovation known as the Iowa Caucuses.
Ray, people will come, Ray. They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past.
[For] all that once was good, and it could be again.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign should have rented a copy of that movie and paid special attention to Jones’ words-especially the bit about “all that once was good, and it could be again.” If they had Clinton might not have become lost in the fields of paradox. Instead as she fought to win the Iowa Caucuses, Clinton and her aides poured into the effort all their knowledge of the “process” of a modern campaign along with a generous amount of resources.
In his biography of Bill Clinton, David Maraniss quotes former Hillary Clinton boyfriend Geoffrey Shields, who viewed her as a pragmatist who would often say,”You can’t accomplish anything in government unless you win!” According to Shields Clinton was a pragmatist more in process than in philosophical traditions.
One Iowan joked that Clinton had more campaign workers in the state than the number of people who caucused in 2004. A New York Times article written less than two months before Iowans gathered reported she had hired 100 new workers with a goal of having 50,000 in-home visits by Christmas, brought eight deputies to drum up media coverage in smaller cities, and spent $360,000 on one week of television commercials.
Former Iowa Governor and Clinton supporter Tom Vilsack thought he understood her strategy: “At the beginning, she didn’t understand the whole notion of relationship building. She now gets it. She now understands the psyche of this process. Any Iowan who read Vilsack’s comments about “relationship building,” knew Clinton faced trouble. That the assessment came from Vilsack created its own paradox; for he had limped out of office leaving Iowans feeling he had lost touch with his own state. His judgment already had been called into question with his embarrassing toe-in-the-water testing of a run for the nation’s highest office, which he quickly abandoned when it became clear even his own state would not support him.
About Vilsack was trying to bolster Clinton’s campaign, I remember a night in a small town bar housed in a faded concrete block cube marked by a neon Budweiser sign in the window. When you walked through the plywood front door you found yourself flanked by an Iowa Hawkeye football team picture on one wall across from the NASCAR memorial to the black number 3 of none other than the Intimidator himself that hung over the bar next to the always-on television which that night featured basketball players wearing the familiar black and gold uniforms of the home team.
As I stood among stacked cases of empty beer bottles watching a backroom card game, a man wearing a burgundy baseball hat with the name of the local GM franchise remarked, “I ain’t getting any richer, that’s for sure.” It was one of those statements offered half-humorously that hangs in the air with such truth that it needed no comment other than knowing glances. He could have recited a long list of issues familiar to any American, but he didn’t need to because everyone cracking peanut shells in that room had experienced them in this community a twenty-minute drive from a venerable Maytag plant that was about to shut its doors forever. They all knew about the rising price of gasoline, the loss of earning power, the constant worry about health care, the uncertainties of globalization, the pace of change, and the loss of control over everything from government decisions to the temptations of the Internet. Besides, no one saw reason to throw a blanket of gloom on an evening when it was still too early for that kind of talk.
What I heard in that small town bar I heard from other Iowans. On the road, I tuned the radio to stations that faded out in the night as static slowly overwhelmed Roy Orbison, singing “Blue Bayou,” the final seconds of the Tigers comeback and commercials where the local Chevy dealer pitched the new Impala with a folksy patter. In so many words these voices confirmed what I had heard in that bar. The folks who went to work every day, brought home enough to juggle the bills for yet another month and hung out a flag on the Fourth of July expressed their skepticism of politicians from both parties. Republicans voiced disappointment George Bush had not kept his promises and Democrats had little idea what their party stood for except that it wasn’t George Bush.
Here in the heartland where patriotism adorns pickup bumpers, people feared that the last century may have been America’s high water mark. Had we not come out on top against everything thrown at us from the Depression to World War II to the Cold War? Small towns clinging to life possessed a survivor’s sense of nostalgia, remembering a time not long ago when a high school graduate could live well and even folks the demographers might describe as lower middle class could purchase a house of their own with even an occasional new car.
By the time of the Iowa Caucuses the American Century seemed like an Iowa winter, where the spring and summer of the past lay locked in the swirling, bitter partisan cross-currents of the present. We blundered into Iraq and then couldn’t find our way out. Inequality in America reached the widest gap since the sweatshop days of the 1890s. Mortgage foreclosures approached Great Depression levels. Our separate but equal education system consisted of some schools with the latest learning technology and excellent teachers while others harbored bathrooms whose overflowing waste coated century-old buildings with the foul odor of neglect and contempt. We ranked behind more than two dozen nations in terms of healthcare quality.
The areas where we did rank high hardly inspired national pride. We consumed an obscene amount of the world’s resources and contributed an embarrassing percentage of its greenhouse gases. Our unilateral foreign policy only further marked us as a rogue elephant of a nation that bulled over everything in our path.
A poll conducted by the Des Moines Register in January 2007 reinforced what I heard in my travels. Its headline told the story, “Iowans pessimistic about future.” The poll showed that only 28 percent of the state’s adults thought the nation was headed in the right direction. Meanwhile 64 percent of Iowans believed “things have gotten off track”.
Not only Iowans felt that way. A July 12, 2007 Rasmussen Report found:
Only 33% of likely voters across the United States believe the country’s best days are ahead of us. That figure is down from 41% last November and 48% in January 2004. Forty-three percent (43%) now believe that the country’s best days have come and gone.
Even more disturbing, the report said younger Americans were less optimistic than their elders. “Just 22% of those under 30 believe the USA has better days ahead,” noted the report.
That same month, in speaking about why she wrote her book, The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values In a Dangerous World, Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter lamented, “I wrote this book because the country I love has lost its way in the world.”
That the head of the Woodrow Wilson School should agree with the Okie from Muskogee, Merle Haggard, marked how serious the situation had become. As he gave interviews to plug his new CD about the same time Hillary Clinton was beefing up her campaign, Haggard complained George Bush had screwed up the country. Then interviewers would cue up the song with its haunting bluegrass background: “What happened, where did America go?”
Note the theme that runs through these disparate pieces of evidence: all revolve around a lost America. When a nation has lost its way that can mean only one thing-it has misplaced or miscalibrated its moral compass. A year after the Des Moines Register poll, a New York Times-CBS poll showed an ominous spike in those who thought the economy was getting worse. Three quarters of the survey’s respondents echoed those in Iowa a year before who believed that the nation had “seriously gotten off on the wrong track.”
Hillary Clinton’s Iowa campaign appeared to live in a separate reality from these data. Blogger Jim Byrd caught what the national press-most of them as unfamiliar with Iowa as Clinton-failed to recognize in the final days of the campaign. Byrd described Clinton’s strategy using an interesting analogy:
The Clinton Machine has apparently developed an affinity for a hybrid version of the military’s “don’t ask don’t tell” policy-which she is vehemently opposed to. When asked any question at this juncture, she refuses to answer… Even though she has nothing to say, her actions speak a million words.
In the past week when Clinton does speak, her speeches have been orchestrated to say nothing and are completely void of substance.
Hillary Clinton’s staff had justly earned a reputation for superior research that pinpoints potential voters and tells you everything about them, including their favorite television shows. Clinton’s chief strategist was Mark Penn, the man who coined the term “soccer moms.” Penn’s reputation rested on his mastering of ”microtargeting,” a methodology Penn hyped in his book Microtrends, whose cover sported an endorsement by none other than Bill Clinton. For Penn, campaigns needed to corral groups like “Country Squires” and “Kids and Cul-de-Sacs” then sear into them the candidate’s brand that became red-hot from carefully-honed media messages.
Yet what might have aided Hillary Clinton in Iowa a lot more than all the microtargeting is exactly what James Earl Jones implied about the field of dreams-people yearn for authenticity and values, for “all that once was good.” The problems with Penn’s strategy was that it treated leadership as if it were soap flakes or deodorant, as commodity rather than conviction; as product rather than process. Penn’s approach lacked two fundamental ingredients that researchers into transformational leadership have identified as crucial to success-values and seeing people as individuals not data.
NOTES:
Maraniss, David, First in His Class, New York: Touchstone, 1995, p. 257.
Zeleny, Jeff, “For Clinton, More Time and More Advertising,” The New York Times, November 18, 2007.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/us/politics/18dems.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Roos, Jonathan, “Iowans pessimistic about future,” DesMoinesRegister.com, January 28, 2007.
Rasmussen Reports, “Pessimism Growing: Just One Third Say America’s Best Days Lie Ahead,” Rasmussen Reports, July 12, 2007.
Slaughter, Anne-Marie, “The Idea That Is America,” http://www.ideathatisamerica.com/.
http://www.ideathatisamerica.com/index.html
Toner, Robin and Marjorie Connelly, “Remarkable Fluidity in G.O.P., Democrats Ponder Electability,” The New York Tines, January 14, 2008, p. A14.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/us/politics/14poll.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Byrd, Jim, “Hillary Clinton’s Risky Iowa Strategy,” A Skewed View, December 28, 2007.
http://jimbyrd.wordpress.com/2007/12/28/hillary-clintons-risky-iowa-strategy/
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