Word: caucus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...than a year, the people of the Hawkeye State attended a graduate seminar in presidential politics while the rest of us got to sleep in and borrow their notes. They took their responsibility seriously, braving suffocating heat at the Ames straw poll in August and near zero temperatures during caucus week to meet the candidates and study their records. They attended town meetings, rallies, coffee klatches and house parties, and they interrupted their family festivities over the holidays to hear two or three more political speeches in large auditoriums and crowded diners across the state...
...themselves, and their voting public, many complicit city-folk remain dissatisfied: if only the stage were set in a more cultured locale. For those Americans with an ocean view—and the inflated sense of self that comes with it—the two-month drone of pre-caucus news from landlocked, lumpy Iowa draws more than a little ire. The same lament comes up over seared ahi again and again, from the Hamptons to La Jolla: Why should a few pig farmers decide who gets to be president? I, suburbanite, felt myself slipping last week into precisely this...
...Indeed, the contest between Romney and Huckabee has been widely framed as a contest between Iowans' body parts: head (Romney) versus heart (Huckabee). Will most of the people who show up on caucus night be "heart" people - the loosely organized homeschoolers and evangelicals to whom Huckabee owes his front-runner status? Or will they be "head" people, precisely targeted and courted by the Romney campaign? (Staffers boast of having made over 36,000 phone calls to supporters in the past two days...
...Algona, a town of about 5,500, Mike Rusch has taken that message to heart. A Huckabee supporter and church elder, he has been talking to his neighbors about the importance of attending the caucus, even though he is a registered independent who has never before participated in the event. "We will be making sure that our friends and neighbors have a ride so they can get there," Rusch said...
...said he is more interested in getting people to the caucus than in bending their ears about supporting Huckabee. "Rural Iowa, or rural Minnesota, in some ways, it's sort of timeless," he said of politicking in Algona. "It's still a lot of small-town elbow rubbing. It's not organized. It takes place over a piece...