3
“THE SUPER BOWL OF POLITICS”
June–July 2007
June 2007
Iowa Polling Average: Edwards 26, Clinton 24,
Obama 20 (RealClearPolitics.com)
National Poll: Clinton 37, Obama 36, Edwards 13
(USA Today/Gallup)
Around the time Camp Obama was getting off the ground, I started on staff as one of five field organizers based in Iowa City. The campaign had already lasted four months, but few voters were paying close attention. In addition to big rallies, the key metric that made Obama a credible candidate was that he’d raised more money than the Clinton campaign in the first quarter of 2007. This was shocking, since the Clintons had been the dominant figures in the Democratic Party for fifteen years. No state would vote until January 2008, so these quarterly finance metrics became national news and were closely watched by political observers as a sign of candidate viability.
Like many of the new people arriving in Iowa, I didn’t have a great sense of what my new job would look like day to day. But I was one of the few who came into the role already familiar with Iowa’s caucus process.
The most important thing to understand about the Iowa caucuses was that they’re not a statewide election—they’re 1,781 simultaneous neighborhood meetings attended by no more than 10 percent of the total population. That process influenced how you organized. To get to know a community, you would start by trying to meet community leaders, because those are the people their neighbors would look to on caucus night. The rules of a caucus allow one voice to change a room—if you can convince your neighbors to back your candidate, no matter what the results are statewide, you can win your neighborhood.
I saw this play out at an early age. When I was fourteen, my dad signed up to be a precinct captain on Bill Bradley’s long shot campaign for president against Al Gore. My dad worshipped Bill Bradley—growing up in New Jersey, he watched Bradley captain the Princeton Tigers to the 1965 Final Four. Finding himself living in Iowa thirty-five years later, he jumped at the chance to help his childhood hero. Despite having never volunteered for a candidate, every Sunday he would cold-call a list of his neighbors on our landline, asking them to support Bradley at the caucus. Few Iowans shared his hometown connection to the candidate, but on caucus night, as Gore dominated statewide, my dad led Bradley’s supporters to a 4–3 delegate victory in Iowa City Precinct Sixteen.
This was the biggest difference between me and the out-of-state newcomers—I didn’t know how to organize, but I knew the community where I was stationed. Our campaign office was across the street from the community rec center where I learned to swim, one block east of the library where I learned to read, and around the corner from the hookah bar where I celebrated my twenty-first birthday. Aside from being at work most of the day, my life continued as it had before. I still lived with friends from high school, sort-of dated my college girlfriend from senior year, and ate dinner with my parents on Sundays. I was aware that most of the other kids left behind relationships, jobs, or school for the chance to move to a state they had never visited and work in a new community. It took a unique personality to make that leap.
As organizers deployed to their assigned turf, first impressions of the state varied. In some rural areas, you could go days without seeing another Obama staffer. In cities like Cedar Rapids, Davenport, or Sioux City, a half dozen could be clustered in the same office.
Marygrace Galston, Iowa Deputy State Director: You always hear about the Iowa caucuses when you’re studying politics. The importance of Iowa and the first in the nation. People called it “the Super Bowl of politics.”
Victoria McCullough, Winneshiek County Field Organizer: I can’t overstate how little I knew about campaigns and what field organizers did. I just had no clue.
Francis Iacobucci, Des Moines, IA, Field Organizer: I didn’t realize the campaign would continue after summer was over. Everyone kept telling me, “Obama’s not gonna make it past July or August.” I arrived in June, which was when the second full wave of organizers hired in Iowa arrived.
I had no idea where I was living. I had no idea how much I was getting paid. I mean, they told me this information, but I was barely twenty-one years old—I wasn’t paying attention. So I stayed in a hotel the first night, which my parents were kind enough to spot for me. I was so nervous that I ordered one of everything on the Embassy Suites menu.
This was my first real job. I had bought new slacks and new brown dress shoes, and the next morning I put them on with my button-up shirt and jacket. I walked into the office and saw kids my age running around in flip-flops, torn shorts, torn jeans, and T-shirts. There were pizza boxes scattered everywhere, paper everywhere, wires hanging down from the ceiling attached to nothing.
No one talked to me at first. They probably thought I was a reporter or something the way I was dressed. Finally someone introduced herself and put me on the phones. I made phone calls all day, until someone had the time to explain what was going on.
By the end of that first day, I was exhausted. I had been talking to people who were more familiar with the process than I was, trying to convince them to support a candidate I knew very little about. It was a really terrifying time but also invigorating. And it was nice to know I could wear flip-flops to work.
Yohannes Abraham, Des Moines, IA, Field Organizer: The team had been around for a few months at that point, and I started the exact same time as a guy named Francis Iacobucci, who would end up being my roommate. We were the two youngest. It was just that very classic new-kid-in-school feeling.
Francis Iacobucci: I was introduced to Yohannes Abraham, who was kind enough to offer me a room in his apartment. He needed someone to live there because he couldn’t afford the rent. We were making $2,000 a month before taxes. He showed me to my room, which was a closet. I smoked at that time, and we would sit and smoke three or four cigarettes on the balcony and just talk about what this all meant.
After starting on staff, most us would gather in Des Moines for an orientation, where Paul Tewes and the state leadership defined what it meant to be part of the Iowa team. You would meet the leaders of each department, who would set expectations for the coming year and frame how our work fit into the campaign’s plan.
Josh Earnest, Iowa Communications Director: Paul invited all of the field staff to come to Des Moines to undergo a staff training. I thought I’d be making a presentation to a group sitting around a table. There was a room full of people who’d already been hired by the campaign, seventy-five or eighty, who were all there to hear from me about exactly what our message was.
Francis Iacobucci: They went around and introduced everybody: Emily Parcell, Anne Filipic, Josh Earnest, Tommy Vietor.
Yohannes Abraham: Part of the training was they set expectations. Things like, “Look, we’re going to be down in the national polls. Those don’t matter. Iowa is the key to everything.”
Victoria McCullough: There was no real training on “Here’s what Barack Obama thinks. Here are his views.” The training was more about, “Here’s the structure of a day. Here’s what an organizer does.”
Yohannes Abraham: The biggest thing that sticks out to me from the training is Mitch Stewart being incredibly intense talking about the importance of the work we were doing. How each of us had the ability to impact the outcome of the election on caucus night. They had us all 100 percent convinced that was the case.
The other thing that stuck with me was…
Francis Iacobucci: “No star fucking.”
Yohannes Abraham: “No star fucking.” He said that explicitly. Every minute you’re spending with the candidate or surrogate is a minute they’re not spending with a caucus goer.
Megan Simpson, Dubuque County, IA, Field Organizer: That training in Des Moines had such an impact. Paul Tewes said, “The most important thing you need to know about organizing is that it’s all about stories and why people are doing what they do. So I want everyone to go around the room, introduce themselves, and tell your soon-to-be friends and coworkers why you’re here.”
Dean Fluker, Johnson County, IA, Field Organizer: Tewes kept saying to us, “Why are you here? Why are you here?” That was a fundamental question—what drives you to be here?
Megan Simpson: I felt so personally invested in everyone’s reasons why. And that—telling stories and connecting with people—had a really big impact on how I viewed organizing.
Paul Tewes, Iowa State Director: I firmly believe this—people have their own belief system, their own values, and that’s what they act upon. A political campaign or a cause is your own way of acting upon your own belief system and values. So by tapping into that, you’re tapping into something internal as opposed to external.
I would tell this to the organizers: “You’re not here because of Barack Obama; you don’t know him. You’re here because of something you believe.”
Most of these kids had no idea who Barack Obama was—they didn’t know him, they didn’t talk to him. I wanted people to work from an internal place and understand that those values were important and what they were doing was acting upon those. That’s what I was trying to convey. We were all there for different reasons, and those reasons are very internal to each of us. That’s much more powerful than an external factor.
Greg Degen, Johnson County Intern: I had never volunteered for a campaign before. Besides my Camp Obama training, I had never had to articulate why I supported Barack Obama.
I vividly remember the first time that I ever knocked on doors being intensely anxious and afraid of talking to a stranger. It was the summer, one of my first days in Iowa, and all the other campaign staff seemed much more senior to me, even though it was a bunch of kids out of college who had just been hired. There was a lot of emphasis on having a well-thought-out conversation with a voter, because Iowa caucus goers expect a lot out of presidential campaigns.
But more than that, I had a lot of social anxiety. I wasn’t supposed to come back with any missing doors. And after being dropped off, I just paced back and forth for a while because I was trying to summon the courage to go do the task that I’d been asked to do. I had that same feeling at the first couple hundred doors I knocked on. For the first couple months of the campaign generally, I had this feeling that I sucked at this. But I really wanted Barack Obama to be the president, so I forced myself to keep doing it.
Carrianna Suiter, Muscatine, IA, Field Organizer: I thought I was gonna be working in Davenport. We were at the first statewide training in Des Moines. Mitch came over and said, “I know you’re about to sign a lease in Davenport. Don’t sign it. You’re moving to Muscatine.” He gave me no room to argue, no room to say anything. I wanted to be in a city.
I was really angry when I got sent to Muscatine. I was isolated. I was by myself. I had four counties in southern Iowa. GPS didn’t work in many of the places I would go. They would tell me, “Turn left at the corn silo, and when you get to Jeff’s old place, turn right.” If I tried using GPS, it would take me to bridges that hadn’t been there in years. Organizers in other regions and cities had other organizers to lean on, to hang out with, to grab a beer with. We worked such long hours, and it was hard not to have that built-in social outlet in the early days. It was lonely.
Michael Halle, Linn County, IA, Field Organizer: The first day I was in Cedar Rapids, there was this smell in the air that was indescribable. It smelled the way that mash smells when you’re making beer.
The second day, there was a different smell that was kind of cinnamony, and I was just like, “What the fuck is going on?” Turns out there’s a General Mills factory there. When they’d make different cereals, the town smelled different. I remember people there would look forward to the Cap’n Crunch days.
As transplants fanned out across Iowa, they introduced themselves to “tier one” activists—local leaders historically active in their local caucus. These Iowans formed the backbone of past candidates’ organizations, and some had participated in half a dozen campaign cycles. They were used to getting attention from future presidents.
Grant Lahmann, Tama County, IA, Field Organizer: When I landed on the ground, my objective was to make myself known in the local Democratic Party establishment, make cold calls, try to find people to meet with.
It’s crazy, but the folks who are involved in Democratic politics in Iowa are totally used to it. “Oh, the Obama guy’s in town. Gotta meet with him.” You know? “Oh, the Clinton person’s in town, gotta have coffee with them, tell them what I know.” That sort of thing. It’s a ritual that many of those folks are very accustomed to, and I realized this was not an out of the ordinary request.
Ally Coll, Council Bluffs, IA, Field Organizer: I was sent to Council Bluffs, a suburb of Omaha. I had no idea what to expect. I was worried that I wouldn’t know anybody in Iowa and wouldn’t have any friends. I didn’t really understand that the campaign would become my whole life.
My turf was the four counties in the southwest corner of the state. They bordered Nebraska and Missouri. There was one central town in each county, the county seat, and those towns were more like five or ten thousand people. I could count on one hand the number of people of color. The first thing I did was I went around and I met with all the county chairs. Most of them had not made up their mind, or else they were leaning toward supporting Clinton or Edwards. There was nobody ready to help me get going for Obama. At the end of the meeting, I would ask them for ten more names of people I should talk to, and then I would reach out to those ten people.
Carrianna Suiter: One of the first stories I heard from the cochair of the county Democrats was that he had gotten pizza delivered to his house by a presidential candidate. I believe it was Howard Dean. He said, “Dean brought pizza to my house. Is Barack Obama gonna bring pizza to my house?”
Greg Degen: When you work on a campaign in Iowa, you have to be incredibly deferential and respectful of their traditions and customs—no matter how strange they may seem.
I remember talking to one person—I asked her if she had decided whom she was supporting in the caucus, and she told me that she hadn’t met all of the candidates yet. This was not a donor, this was not a party member, this wasn’t any kind of influential figure. This was an ordinary citizen who expected to actually meet presidential candidates in person and probably ask them a question.
Linda Langston, Linn County, IA, Supervisor: Iowans take their politics very seriously. I’ve seen candidates come in over and over again, making an assumption that it’s like politics they’ve seen elsewhere—they come in and they get brutally questioned by people here who are very well informed, which I think makes them better candidates. That, to me, is the gift that Iowans give the rest of the country. And I suspect it’s very much the same in New Hampshire.
Tommy Vietor, Obama Iowa Press Secretary: The caucuses are imperfect to say the least—if you’re disabled or if you’re working nights, you can’t give that kind of time. But I think those flaws are also balanced out by the importance of a process where you have to take hard questions from real people every day.
The first time I heard about section 215 of the Patriot Act was in some farmer’s backyard in Iowa. Because there was just some really smart guy who was worried about the Patriot Act. That candidate accessibility, transparency, and respect for the press in a political process that ultimately is about an interaction between two individuals—and then believing that they’ll do what they say they’re gonna do—is the key to the whole thing.
It can be a dumb, weird, imperfect way to choose a president, but there’s something incredibly valuable that comes from retail campaigning. It creates a lot of hardship for these candidates, and they have to show they can manage it in real time.
Libby Slappey, Cedar Rapids, IA, Democratic Activist: When you’re an Iowan, you have an obligation to do your homework. I have friends in San Francisco who are political junkies and who are so envious of us in Iowa because we get to vet everybody.
Linda Langston: People in New York pay thousands of dollars to go to fundraisers and if they’re lucky will see a candidate across a room of 250 people. But in Iowa you’ll have a room with 30 people in it. You get to ask really tough questions, and you get to watch what their response is.
Mark Smith, Iowa State Representative: My wife and I have friends that simply cannot believe that I have sat down and had dinner with Senator Christopher Dodd, that I had the opportunity to introduce Hillary Clinton. It is unfathomable that these three million people that call Iowa their home have so much opportunity to spend time with the presidential candidates.
Jan Bauer, Story County Democratic Chair: The first time you get called by one of them, it’s very shocking. You think, “Whoa. This is who?”
Cathy Bolkcom, Quad Cities Democratic Activist: I was here one morning, the phone rang, and I answered it.
“Cathy?”
“Yes.”
“This is Barack Obama.”
“Hi, Senator. How are you?”
“Oh, I’m very well. How are you? I’m running for president, and I’d really like to have your support.”
And I said, “You know, I appreciate that. It’s early. I haven’t really made up my mind yet.”
Steve Dunwoody, Cedar County, IA, Field Organizer: My regional director gave me the names of a few people to get in touch with and to talk to in Cedar County to get the lay of the land. So one of the first people I met with was Clara Oleson. Clara was, at that time, around sixty-five years old, a retired white civil rights lawyer.
Clara Oleson, Cedar County, IA, Democratic Activist: Steve Dunwoody showed up and said, “How about coming on board for Obama?”
I said, “Are you insane? It’s too far out. I would be doing nothing except this man’s campaign for the year until the caucus. I can’t do it. It’s too early. I love him, but no, it’s too early.”
It took quite a few meetings in my living room for Steve to convince me. I had been very active in every campaign. The first presidential campaign that I became involved with was in Iowa, and it was the Shirley Chisholm campaign in 1972. Black congresswoman, feminist, strong. I went to Brooklyn and heard her announce it in the Bedford-Stuyvesant grade school that she had gone to. Before that, I had been involved in the antiwar movement and with feminist activities.
I’ve seen every presidential candidate. I was with Jesse Jackson twice, in ’84 and ’88. Motivation for being with these candidates varies—it’s based on a belief in what America is and could be.
I didn’t think I would live long enough to work on a campaign with a Black person who had a chance for the presidency. You wouldn’t have Obama without Jackson or Shirley Chisholm, because change in America is not instantaneous—it takes decades. Democracy is like a garden. A tree does not grow in a year.
Steve Dunwoody: Despite having lived in Iowa for many years, Clara was still in a sense locally viewed as an outsider because she was from New York. When I met with her, she gave me a lot of advice. She said, “Well, one of the things you’re going to want to do in every conversation you have with people is tell them you’re a veteran right away. That will establish trust. That will give you an entrée.”
And it’s funny, because the way that she was speaking to me is kind of like the way a lot of Black youth get spoken to by their parents at a young age. It’s called “the talk.” You get “the talk” when you’re old enough to go to stores on your own or old enough to walk around on the street. My parents told me, “Always get a receipt whenever you purchase something. Never walk around in a store with your hands in your pocket. Always say please and thank you. Smile as much as you can.” The way that she was speaking to me was reminiscent of that. I could tell it was coming from one part curiosity, but it was also concern for how I might be treated in the county.
Clara Oleson: I said, “OK, I’ve been down this road for thirty years. I’m gonna give you ‘the talk.’” Which is, “You don’t run up your credit cards. You don’t run up long-distance calls on other people’s phones. You don’t hit anybody.” Because these are all things that staffers had done in the past.
And I said, “Can we talk about race? Did anyone in Des Moines mention that you were coming to a county with, according to the census, sixteen Black people?”
Steve Dunwoody: She asked if the campaign sending me, a Black man, to Cedar County was a way to test feelings and attitudes toward race. She was truly trying to understand why this twenty-five-year-old kid was being sent from Detroit, Michigan, to Cedar County. And I told her I didn’t know.
Clara Oleson: I said, “For the first month, you will not go to a bar after eight o’clock at night. When you go to a small town, the first stop you will make will be at the cop shop, and you will introduce yourself as follows: ‘Hello, I’m Steve Dunwoody, I’m an Iraq War veteran, and I’m on staff for Senator Barack Obama,’ in that order. And then you will shake their hands. You will be shaking hands with people who have never touched a Black person before. The reason you’re going to the cop shop is because otherwise when you knock on doors, they’re gonna call the cops, and you’re gonna meet them for the first time in the middle of the street.”
Steve Dunwoody had the Blackest face of anybody I’d ever met. He was the first one in Cedar County—there weren’t any Clinton people at that point. And I said, “This place will be swarming before the caucus with young white people, and your face will stand out. They’ll remember you—it’s gonna be an advantage—just hang in there.”
Steve Dunwoody: I didn’t take that the wrong way. It felt more like the way a mother would advise her child on being careful. In fact, I came to call Clara my “surrogate mom” in Cedar County. To me, Clara was Cedar County, in the sense that she was my first contact. There were very few people there who were openly for President Obama at that time. And she prepared me for what would come later on.
The most difficult time I had there was when I would canvass in these communities and get stopped by the police. I was always used to being looked at extra hard at parades. Like, “What’s this Black kid doing here?” I ignored that. But being stopped by the police was probably the toughest experience in Iowa.
Later, when I started having coffee in the local community with my blazer and jeans on, I got asked by several women if I was Barack Obama. I had to disappoint them and tell them that I wasn’t. There just was not a lot of exposure to Black people there. I took Clara’s advice. In subsequent meetings, I said, “I’m Steve Dunwoody, and I’m a veteran.”
Despite huge turnout at Obama’s first rallies, early interest had failed to translate into momentum in the polls—he ran second nationally and third in Iowa, behind Senator Clinton and Senator Edwards. Reports of Obama’s performance in front of Iowa crowds throughout the early spring had left his staff seriously concerned.
Emily Parcell, Iowa Political Director: Obama’s first Iowa event was the most boring event I’ve ever been to in politics. It was successful because we had twenty-two hundred people. But it was so boring. It was like, “I thought this guy was supposed to set rooms on fire. What is going on?” He didn’t have his campaign legs under him at all. It was like being in one of the world’s most boring college lectures.
David Plouffe, Campaign Manager: Our first trips to Iowa during our announcement tour were great successes. And some of our initial forays after that had big crowds, core people signing up. But it’s Iowa—people need to be convinced to support you. So then we went into a period of drudgery. Crowds got smaller. There were fewer people signing up, since they were all getting courted by different candidates.
Emily Parcell: When we started, we did have giant crowds from day one, but we didn’t start with support.
Alyssa Mastromonaco, Director of Scheduling and Advance: The crowds were never about support. They were about curiosity. Part of why people were so hot to come out and see Obama was because they were like, “Who is this guy?” Curiosity really drove the first couple of months.
Dan Pfeiffer, Deputy Communications Director: By the early part of the summer of 2007, we had come down to earth pretty quickly. Because what happened was we got through that first excitement—all of this campaigning, a bunch of early endorsements, we outraised the Clintons in the first fundraising quarter—and then we hit a wall.
The first debate didn’t go great; the second debate went worse. In the world of political prognosticators, they started arguing that maybe this Obama thing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, that maybe Hillary really was unbeatable—she had a huge lead in the national polls.
Then-Senator Obama was struggling a little bit with the rigors of campaigning. Doing the same event four, five times a day wasn’t interesting for him, and that became palpable.
David Axelrod, Chief Strategist: He didn’t get a chance to work in semiobscurity to refine his material and get used to the pace of a presidential race. We opened on Broadway, and the critics were right in the front row. That put a lot on the organization and on him in particular. And he wasn’t flawless to begin with.
There was a health care debate in Nevada early, and he just disappointed. He hadn’t done the intellectual work on health care yet. The briefings were inadequate. And this was something that Senator Clinton knew cold, having worked on the issue for so long. Senator Edwards had been a candidate longer and had been a candidate in 2004, so he was prepared, and the basic story out of Vegas was, “Obama’s not ready.”
The same was true of his first debate in South Carolina. He just wasn’t very sharp. And he was very honest about it. He did say, “I’m not a good candidate now, but I will be. Give me the time to learn how to be a good candidate and I will become a good candidate.”
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I don’t think anyone looked at Senator Obama and thought, “He’s having the time of his life.” One of the things that people love about him is his authenticity. Running for president you had to do a bunch of events that were like a goat and pony show. And I think part of him was like, “Is this really what it’s about? I really just want to be talking to people.” The reality of how this was really going to be was kind of setting in.
David Plouffe: After the initiation of getting in, Barack Obama experienced what most people experience, which is, “This is really hard—I’m basically asking people for money, and when I’m not doing that, I’m asking people in states like Iowa and New Hampshire to support me. And no one is saying yes because they want to wait and see.”
Paul Tewes: The problem he always had was that the first impression people ever got from him was the convention speech in 2004. So the second impression was never gonna be as good as that. Especially when it’s on TV and he’s this “mythical figure” and all that. They see him up close, and maybe he’s a little tired or something. You just can’t measure up to that constantly. So by the nature of that, people would walk away and think, “Man, he wasn’t as good as he was at the convention.”
Tommy Vietor: Campaigning is like anything you do—you get better with reps, and he needed a lot of reps.
Marygrace Galston: At one point, we were going through the schedule with him so he could see what the next couple of days looked like in Iowa. He said, “Wow. We’re running a schedule like it’s October or November, and it’s only June.”
I remember thinking, “He has no idea what’s ahead. This is going to get much busier.” I’m not the first person to say this, but he did not get it at the beginning. Iowans could tell that he didn’t understand why he was having to call a central committee member of the Iowa Democratic Party, “Joe Blow” in Cedar Falls, as opposed to a state senator or regional union leader. That that person is going to talk to all the candidates, spend time with all of them, and not make a decision until a month before the caucus.
So in the spring, Tewes told Plouffe we might as well not have him meet with Iowans until he got better. It was doing more harm than good.
David Plouffe: He wasn’t performing as well as he knew he could. It took a while to find his footing, and I think he struggled with the pace of the campaign, bouncing between Iowa and New Hampshire, Washington, and Chicago. The early part of the Iowa campaign is talking to a lot of people, and none of them sign up for you because it’s “too early.” That can be dispiriting, so I think Paul’s message was, “If we’re not going to make the kind of progress we need to make, and you’re not performing as well as you can, time’s valuable. Spend it with your family. Go to New Hampshire. Work on your speeches. You’ve got to get better.”
The conversations I would have with Barack Obama in the beginning were largely centered around, “At some point you have to own this.” Like, “Iowa can’t be something you’re scheduled to do. You’re the one who has to say, ‘Why aren’t we going back in two days?’ and, ‘Hey, we haven’t been to Sioux City in a while. Why aren’t we going there?’ You need to really recognize everybody when you go there. Know their names. Ask them how it’s going. You’ve got to become essentially the CEO of this.” Own it. Live it. Breathe it. And he didn’t do that for a long time.
Barack Obama: Whenever you start a campaign and you haven’t been campaigning for a while, it takes a while for you to get back into game shape. It feels like a grind. You’re away from home; you’re waking up early; you’re going to bed late; your meals are irregular; you’re traveling—at that time—in vans and in cars and making phone calls in between, trying to raise money. You’re making mistakes and, generally speaking, you’re frustrated that you’re not sharper.
David Plouffe: In a caucus state like Iowa, it’s about the candidate building relationships with people at the grassroots level. As we got into the summer, it clicked. He just got comfortable in Iowa. He started to know what he wanted to say with a little bit more clarity and confidence, and the organizer in him kicked in. It became something he enjoyed because it was so familiar to him.
Barack Obama: The experience of talking to people directly—that was always fun. The town hall meetings themselves were always encouraging. And probably the thing that really kicked us into gear was just seeing this incredible young staff that slowly developed.
I’ve always said that it was really the team on the ground—and I would include the volunteers with that—those staff and volunteers that carried us in those early months at a time when we were still honing our message and I was still finding my way as a candidate.
Bess Evans, Spencer, IA, Field Organizer: I was in the middle of nowhere with one other staffer. We were really alone out there. The people in Des Moines—it felt like they were in a different world.
Spencer is a town of about ten thousand. It has a main drag of Grand Avenue—that was a really big deal, to have our campaign office in Spencer on Grand Avenue. We opened it at the end of June. They did all of these events in Spencer hosted by the Spencer Chamber of Commerce. All the stores on Grand Avenue would give out hot dogs. It was called Thanks with Franks. We participated, and the local radio station said we had the best hot dogs, because we had Chicago-style hot dogs to honor our candidate. I remember scouring every shelf in Hy-Vee looking for the kind of relish I wanted and the kind of peppers I needed to make a real Chicago-style hot dog. It felt very important.
Carrianna Suiter: You really turn to the community. You know so much about these people’s lives. You become a part of it. They become your family. Your volunteers really are the ones that get you through all of it.
You weren’t just having one conversation and trying to persuade these people. I had a lease. I lived there for eight, nine months. You knew their grandkids. You saw them at the grocery store. I joined a knitting circle.
Mitch Stewart wanted us to get more involved in our communities, to get out of the offices more. He wanted us to connect with people on a personal level and not just on a political level. There was a yarn store across the street from my office, and there were these wonderful ladies who taught me to knit. You didn’t talk about politics when you were doing those things. We had no free time, so having permission to do something and have two hours every week to just be part of something was awesome. I entered a bag into a competition. Ultimately one of the women from that knitting circle became a precinct captain.
Thomas Zimmerman, Sioux City, IA, Field Organizer: Early on in the caucus, you had all of these twentysomething politicos dumped into town, so we all kind of hung out together. We would have the Edwards folks and the Clinton folks and the Dodd folks and the Richardson folks, and we’d go out drinking.
For some reason, the Edwards folks were really into flip cup. That was their thing to burn off stress. They set it up so that the flip cup would be “tier one” candidates versus “tier two” candidates. At one point the Clinton people demanded the Edwards people move to the tier two side of the table for balance. That didn’t go over well.
Yohannes Abraham: I talked to my buddies who were in more rural parts of the state, where it was very clear there was one Obama, one Clinton, and one Edwards organizer. They woke up every morning and knew who their competition was.
Tyler Lechtenberg, Marshalltown, IA, Field Organizer: I would leave the office at night and drive by the other offices, like the Edwards office and the Clinton office and the Richardson office, just to make sure that all their lights were off by the time I left.
You run into these other organizers at events. I realized that these people were essentially like me, people who cared about making the country better and had a passion for politics and wanted to make a difference. But I also had this clear competition with them. Under any other circumstances, we might have been friends. But I just couldn’t stand them.
Joe Cupka, Story County, IA, Field Organizer: When the Hillary people were still leading us in the polls, I remember they wanted to be friends with everybody. As far as I was concerned, they were trying to stop me from doing my part to change the world. I didn’t have time for that.
Bess Evans: The Clinton campaign had an office in Spencer. It was right off Grand Avenue, just around the corner from us. We could see their office from our office. At one point I actually went on a few dates with one of their organizers from another town. He told me several of their campaign targets. He was fired not long after.
There is a stereotype that all Iowans are deeply engaged in the caucus process, but in reality it’s a very small subset of the population. The 2004 election had set turnout records when less than 5 percent of the state (124,000 people) showed up, so the only way to identify 100,000 Obama supporters would be reaching Iowans who were less politically engaged, partly through hours of cold-calling and canvassing every day.
Yohannes Abraham: It was very common to be sitting in the campaign office during call time and have to explain who Barack Obama was. If you were calling a hundred people and you connected with twenty of them, you were going to have a few of them asking, “Who is Barack Obama?”
Greg Degen, Johnson County, IA, Field Organizer: You would explain to them, “Well, he’s the candidate from Illinois—he’s a senator, and he was a state senator before that.” You would say, “You may have seen that he had this very prominent speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. He’s the candidate that was against the Iraq War from the start.” But then you would basically have to tell people, “Yes, he’s the Black candidate running for president.”
After that, people generally knew who he was.
Lauren Kidwell, Regional Field Director: The universe of caucus goers was so small relative to the number of staff we had, so we were organizing at such a direct level. Each field organizer could name the people on their persuasion list. They knew them because they called them so many times.
Bess Evans: The hard part about working for any candidate that you care about is when people don’t match your passion with their passion. I remember making my first phone calls and thinking, “Have I made a terrible mistake?” People would hang up on you. I took everything very personally, because it felt personal to me.
Shannon Valley, Decorah, IA, Intern: A struggle for me was trying to build relationships with a lot of people very quickly. It was an experience that I would not trade for anything. I made some amazing friendships within the community, some that are still ongoing. Anybody who’s doing political work should go through the field. But I’m an introvert at heart. Dealing with a mass of people as often as I had to on a day-to-day basis was so exhausting.
Annick Febrey, Floyd County, IA, Field Organizer: I had in my head that this campaign experience was going to be me and a whole bunch of other folks my age doing politics, working really hard, but also having this sort of shared experience together.
I went to Charles City, which was this small town of eight thousand people up north in a very rural area, and it was all cornfields for hours. It was this really sleepy little town that was about two blocks long. I rented an apartment that was in the low-income housing section, because most people lived on farms.
I vividly remember doing anything to entertain myself for four hours of call time. One of them was focusing on the stranger-sounding names. That was actually why I called Carl Vogelhuber. He preferred to talk in person, so he came by the office a couple of times to chat. And then he started coming in every day, and he’d volunteer all morning. There was one restaurant in town, so we’d walk there and get lunch, and then I’d walk him home because he lived a block from there.
He essentially became my best friend. He was eighty-four at the time, a retired rocket scientist. I had no friends in the area. I was living by myself in this really sad apartment. Carl came in every morning, and he knew so much about the town and knew so much about who the influential people were outside of the elected officials.
He made a ton of phone calls. He did weekly letters to the editor. He and his wife had a number of house parties. And he was an elder in one of the local churches, which I think had nine members. They ran an interfaith group on Saturday mornings that I started going to. I found that once I gave up being sad and lonely and really became a part of the town, it got a lot easier. It took a little while for me to let go of what I thought it was going to be versus what it actually was.
Ally Coll: At one point, I got a school board member to agree to go canvassing with me. I remember being so struck by the effectiveness of that. The difference that it made to the people in her neighborhood to see her. It changed the way people responded to me at the door and their receptiveness to the message that I was trying to share.
The job pushed me completely out of my comfort zone and forced me to become comfortable talking not only to strangers but to strangers whose background I had very little in common with and whom I immediately was asking to do things for me. That was so unfamiliar, but I was really struck by—sounds like a cliché—the friendliness of the people who I met. The way that they welcomed me into their communities was very tangible and very immediate. I didn’t have teams of volunteers all meeting up together, but I had individuals who accompanied me on most canvassing shifts one-on-one.
More than 10,000 Obama Supporters Take Part in More Than 1,000 “Walk for Change” Events Across the Country
—Targeted News Service, June 9, 2007
Obama Apologizes for “Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)” Memo
—New York Times, June 19, 2007
“Cheap” Jab Blurs Obama’s Clean Run
—Des Moines Register, June 19, 2007
Obama Tops His Rivals, Raising $32.5 Million in Quarter
—New York Times, July 1, 2007
Obama’s Camp Cultivates Crop in Small Donors
—New York Times, July 17, 2007
Obama Gives Tough Talk on Pakistan, Terrorists; He Says He’d Reserve the Right to Invade and End Aid if the U.S. Ally Didn’t Fight Terror. His Liberal Base May Take Issue
—Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2007
Obama’s Foreign Vision Is Exciting—and Also Naive
—Roll Call, August 2, 2007
Clinton Demurs on Obama’s Nuclear Stance; She Says It Is Unwise to Rule Out Using the Arms Against Terrorists
—Washington Post, August 3, 2007