Word: iowa
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...Loras College, a tiny Catholic school in Iowa, Brownback is speaking to a pro-life group. Five minutes into his talk, standing in front of a statue of Jesus on the Cross, he mentions his daughter. He has been talking to her on the phone all day as she boards flights to head home to Kansas. He hasn't seen her since she joined Teach for America months ago. It will be days before he's home. And he starts...
This is when running for President gets really hard. A bleak, windy Sunday morning in Fort Dodge, Iowa. The local roads are ice. As John Edwards enters the community-college cafeteria, his campaign workers are picking up rows of chairs--to make sure the media don't shoot the empty seats. Edwards trudges through his stump speech--the least engaged I've ever seen him--and specifically asks the sparse gathering for questions about the issues he considers important: health care, global warming, poverty, the economy. There are none such. The questions are odd, off point. A Native American accuses...
...next stop is better, but not much better, and there are several more stops after that. Edwards' passionate, populist stump speech reminds you that his greatest strength as a trial lawyer used to be his closing argument. But this is Iowa, where all closing arguments are being delivered to hung juries. Even the people who support Edwards aren't so sure...
...mention all this not to heap slag or prognostication--the journalistic equivalent of slag--upon the Edwards campaign but to give you a sense of what life is like for nearly every one of the candidates dragging themselves defiantly through Iowa in the final weeks of this campaign. No one knows what's going to happen--and almost everyone appears to be losing ground, slipping on the Iowa ice, with the possible exceptions of Barack Obama and, on the Republican side, Mike Huckabee...
Given the similarity of their positions and that presidential campaigns inevitably turn on character, it seems likely that this Iowa caucus will be decided personally, viscerally, for reasons that the voters themselves can't always explain. In Algona, Iowa, I spoke with Chris and Martin Peterson, two former Republicans turned off by the Bush Administration, who seemed stumped by their own preferences this year. Chris was thinking about voting for Obama. "I just like him," she said. Her husband Martin was leaning toward Bill Richardson, citing the New Mexico Governor's humorous ads. This may dismay wonks, who want voters...