The American Future (3 page)

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 had 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.

Given the elated solemnity of the moment, the chairperson could probably have found better words to kick off the proceedings than “Let's cha-cha-cha.” But it didn't matter. At 7:15, the people rose from their seats, moved from where they were standing as best as they could, in the chaotic crush, toward their “preference.” For a moment the whole thing felt like summer camp: adolescent glee; lots of “OVER HERE!” shouts; self-conscious giggles. But there were also professors with urgent eyebrows, like Team Leaders, carving a route through
the throng. After the immediate rush and crush, a certain ceremoniousness descended. The voters of Precinct 53 were, after all, literally taking positions; standing for something and someone. It had been like that in the local comitia of the Roman Republic too, so Cicero tells us in
Pro Flacco,
when proposals to vote sitting down had been defeated as an attempt to introduce Greek decadence into the proceedings. Citizens truly standing for something or someone stood unblushingly and visibly before their neighbors and took the social consequences. And for a moment, the Chucks and Katies seemed dissolved into the long marvelous history of civic liberty.

The “preference groups” gathered in knots around the room surveyed each other; quick head counts were taken. And then it became obvious that something startling was still going on. The left-hand corner of the room, Obama's, had not yet settled into a solid knot of supporters. It was still being fed by a moving coil of people: multi-pedal like a dragon at Chinese New Year or a slow conga line, steadily shuffling and shoving its way toward the corner, which was having to expand along the length of the left-hand wall to absorb the numbers of oncomers. Much later in the long campaign, close to the Pennsylvania primary, the Clinton team would suggest that she had done less well in the caucuses because the Obama organization had packed them with aggressive stalwarts who intimidated people into joining their camp. But that wasn't how it happened on this first night in the caucus for Precinct 53. This was the physical expression of choice. The face of the Clinton precinct captain, whom I'd seen earlier in the afternoon, as she took this in, looked bleakly exhausted. Her camp was mostly seated; there was plenty of room to spare.

It was not yet over. Supporters of minor contenders now deemed officially “unviable” were free to redistribute themselves along with the Undecideds in the middle of the room. There were no more than perhaps a dozen of them facing outward to listen to rival advocates. But a lot of cross-room appeals were being made—and looking at the ongoing carnival that was the Obama corner, there were temptations to defect to what was, in every sense, the more fun party. A blonde in her twenties, sharply dressed, curvy, a reporter with one of the news networks, had managed, by imploring, to sneak into the caucus a minute or two after the Closing of the Doors. She was barely in when a high school senior, ginger-haired and ardent, had made his
move, excitedly chatting her up with merry talk of comparative healthcare systems. In round one he stood with her in the Clinton corner. Now, still talking, he was moving away from the group as though he'd discovered it was the carrier of some sort of social contagion. Every so often he would peel his gaze away from the object of his infatuation and transfer it, with even greater ardor, toward the Obama corner. Finally it was too much. He broke off and started to move their way. “Stay with US,” the blonde shouted. “You said you would.” “Yeah, sorry but gotta do this. See you later?” “Oh SURE,” she snapped back.

The final tally was done by counting off, military style; each supporter calling out the next number until the group was done. This was an economical way to count the groups, but it also made the notion of a vote—a shouted voice—powerfully literal. Thus the vox populi of Des Moines sounded: elderly aunts; high school tenors; gravelly taxi drivers; sonorous lawyers: “TWENTY-THREE,” “TWENTY-FOUR”…By the time we got to Obama's 186 (to Edwards's 116 and Clinton's 74), the magnitude of what had just happened was inescapable. But perhaps it was just somehow the quirk of Precinct 53, where maybe Obama had campaigned more intensively than elsewhere. I went down the hall to Precinct 54, meeting in the assembly hall. They had just finished their tally and the distribution of votes was almost identical with the one I'd just seen. Perhaps this was going to happen right across the city, right across the state: Jack Judges in their hundreds of thousands willing something different in American politics; a democratic restoration.

Around the corner, the Republicans had gathered; a smaller, less hectic affair with seated caucus-goers enduring reading of statements from all the candidates—and there were a lot of them. Some, like John McCain, had mostly given Iowa a miss, gambling, shrewdly as it would turn out, on New Hampshire, where since the campaign of 2000 there had been longtime respect and affection for the senator's idiosyncratic style and beliefs. The real choice had been between Romney, the standard-bearer of the conservative notables in the party, and the unorthodox pastor Mike Huckabee. Though the numbers voting were barely a third of the Democrats, Huckabee had beaten Romney by almost the same nearly 3:1 margin that Obama had scored over Clinton.

It didn't take a genius, much less a media analyst, to figure out
what was going on in Iowa: a populist rejection of political business-as-usual, of the dominant orthodoxies. The
New York Times
had endorsed Hillary Clinton. Iowa voted Obama. The conservative talk-show pundits had anointed Romney as the flag-bearer of their causes—gung-ho for the war; committed to overturning legalization of abortion; permanent deep tax cuts written in letters of blood—and had warned against the undependable affability of Huckabee. Iowa Republicans by the flockful gave him their vote. And the runner-up, also by a clear margin, was the other maverick in the pack, Ron Paul, who had also been treated by the mainstream Republican suits in the television debates like a creature from another planet who had no business, what with his outrageous attacks on President Bush (whom he wanted impeached), sharing their podium. But for the Republican faithful, who had seen their party disappear into the pockets of self-appointed oligarchs and managers, the likes of Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee were ideological catnip. I liked to think of the bearded apostle of the streets roaring happily at the television that night.

At the downtown media center: television pundits, adjusting their ties before the banks of lights as these results came in from all over the state confirming something like a little earthquake had indeed happened, stuck to their spiked guns. What was this: the joke,
Ron Paul
, taking more votes than Mitt? There was much on-camera shaking of heads and wiseacre warnings along the lines of “Senator Obama still has a very long way to go”—which was undeniable but not really the news of the night. The media corps was taking it personally, as if stung by the voters' refusal to fall in line with the truisms they had been rehearsing for months: the formidable invincibility of the Clinton campaign; the solid ranks of party notables who had declared for her; the bulging bank account; the astute campaign warriors; also—the managerial smarts of Mitt Romney; the presidential manner he exuded on the air and on the rally platform; the cross-party appeal to Independents and to the patriot corner of the 9/11 mayor, Rudy Giuliani. But all of this had, apparently, meant little or nothing. Could it be that it was precisely the parade of conventional wisdoms, the construction of inevitabilities, that was the object of Iowa voters' repudiation?

As the big screen at the media center rolled onward with its counts, it became dramatically apparent that whatever was going on was
happening in numbers that had never been seen before. Rural or urban districts, it made no difference; counts, even in a politically active state like Iowa, were now up by two or three times. In other state primaries to come, voting figures would be even more staggering. In Nevada in 2004, some 10,000 had voted in the primaries; in 2008, that figure was nearly 110,000. This was the real surge, the one that mattered, of a popular democracy acting as though it could actually effect an alteration of power. And it had happened in a way that surely Tocqueville would have recognized as authentically American: a breakout from the entrapment of management; from the platitudes about the dominance of money, of television advertising; from the pet theories of the press and radio; from the cool manipulation of the campaign pros. This had happened through the recovery of directness, the transparency of neighborhood meetings, face-to-face; the shows of hands; the unapologetic sounding of voices; precisely the unapologetic demonstration of choice that was unthinkable in societies where democracy was a matter of form rather than substance, and where publicly endorsing your preference was likely to be noticed by those who might pay you back for it in currency you'd rather not have. Or it might be even worse. At the very time when the voters of Iowa were persuading each other, in Kenya voters were trying to kill each other.