The Iowa Caucuses and the Real Iowa

The Republican caucuses in Iowa will soon be history, not a moment too soon for most of us but especially for Iowans themselves. For months, they have been bombarded with TV ads and swarmed by plagues of politicians. Even worse, they have been diced, sliced, anatomized, psychoanalyzed and socially parsed by teams of visiting journalists and even some local writers, all straining on slow news days to explain to readers and viewers what makes this bellwether state tick, anyway.

As a native Iowan, gone since youth but a frequent visitor in recent years, I may be permitted a voice in this debate, both on the state itself and on how it's being presented, before the spotlight shifts to New Hampshire and leaves Iowa in grateful obscurity for another four years.   

Much of Iowans' recent ire hasn't dealt so much with outsiders' portrayal of the state as with an article in The Atlantic magazine by an adopted son, a University of Iowa journalism professor named Stephen G. Bloom. Bloom, asked by the Atlantic to explain a state that has such an outsized impact on presidential politics, made some good points but so wrapped them in bucolic cliches and outright errors that whatever he meant to say got lost.

The article noted the decline and shabbiness of many of Iowa's old industrial cities, the brain drain of bright young people, the isolation of farm life, the laid-off factory workers stuck in small farm towns, the proliferation of casinos as a substitute for a real economy. It skewered Rep. Steve King, the northwest Iowa Republican who may be Congress' leading anti-immigration demagogue, and bemoaned the empty storefronts lining too many main streets. All these are issues that should be bothering Iowans -- because they're true, not because Stephen Bloom spotted them.

But the sheer sloppiness of the article makes it easy for these same Iowans to ignore these valid points. All journalists, if not journalism professors, know that it's necessary to sweat the small stuff, to get the details right, or be ignored. It's too easy to conclude that if Bloom thinks that Iowans hunt turkeys with rifles (instead of shotguns), he must be wrong on the economy, too.

There were a lot of these little mistakes. Some old Mississippi River towns are pretty dismal but some, like Dubuque, sparkle. Iowa is not exactly a melting pot but it's 91 percent white, not 96 percent. Not all Iowans buy dogs for the sole purpose of hunting. Most Iowans are not named Snitker or Slabach. More egregiously, Bloom relied on his memory -- always a journalistic mistake -- of a 20-year-old headline to portray the estimable Cedar Rapids Gazette, one of the Midwest's better newspapers, as a religious rag.

Outraged readers have loaded the websites with these gaffes. The Atlantic had to correct four of them online, an embarrassment for any publication. But the real problem with the article was Bloom's sweeping generalizations, more or less painting all Iowans as good-natured, gospel-walloping bumpkins, meeting the candidates down by the grain elevator over biscuits and gravy or, more elegantly, Tatertot casseroles, getting their kicks from tractor pulls and lining their country roads with billboards advertising boar semen or JESUS (in capitals).

These things exist, as they do in most states. But most states, including Iowa, are more interesting and more textured, with a reality that is much more than the sum of these traits. It's this reality that must be grasped before Iowa's role in the presidential process, and the importance we should put on the caucuses, can be understood.

First, there's more to Iowa politics than the Republican caucuses. As Bloom correctly noted, Iowa is a politically schizophrenic place, split pretty evenly between Democrats (predominately in the industrial eastern half of the state, largely urban and pro-union) and Republicans (more often found in western Iowa, more rural and conservative, where Lutherans and the Farm Bureau hold sway). Iowa is the original swing state. For years, it has sent a liberal Democrat and a conservative Republican to the Senate. Its swing status makes it vital in presidential elections. Like Ohio and other Midwestern states, it's crucial to electoral victory.

But even this is a generalization. Bloom, like others, complains that Iowa shouldn't be allowed its early primary, because "it's not representative" of the country, although he doesn't identify a more representative state. The fact is that the Iowa caucuses, which bring out activists more than traditional voters, aren't representative of Iowa politics. For that matter, the Republican caucuses aren't even representative of Iowa Republicans.

Viewers of the 14 caucus debates can be forgiven for concluding that all Iowa Republicans are far-right fundamentalists who hate immigrants, applaud at executions and believe that it's more important that a president know his Bible than his economics. This describes some Iowa Republicans, but a sane and decent person like the Republican governor, Terry Branstad, must wonder what a nice guy like him is doing in a party like that.

(Not to bait Iowa Republicans. If their caucuses once gave a top spot to Pat Robertson, Iowa Democrats did the same for Jesse Jackson. Never again did either preacher come so close to being the people's choice.)

Iowa has a reputation as one big farm, but that's wrong. Farming accounts for only 6 percent of Iowa's economy and less of its population. Manufacturing accounts for 17 percent, far enough above the national average to put it among the top five manufacturing states. More than 70 percent of Iowans live in urban areas. Fourteen of Iowa's 99 counties are officially called "agricultural," in that they get most of their income from farming. At least twice as many are "industrial," and the rest are either "service" or mixed.

Iowa indeed is mostly white but the Latino population has quadrupled in the past 20 years. Many towns remain virtually all white but cities are more diversified and some small farm and meatpacking towns are majority Latino or becoming so, as noted in a recent article on the primaries in the Financial Times. 

This means that Iowa is more "representative" of the nation that many people, including locals like Bloom, think. Less than one-third of the state's Republicans rate as deep-dyed Evangelicals, which translates to about 15 percent of all Iowa voters. The rest of the state worries about the same things -- the economy, globalization, deficits, education, jobs, the Mideast, China -- as the rest of the nation.

Because the Republican caucuses don't represent Iowa or even many Iowans, they won't settle anything. But the endless campaigning there has given the rest of us a good look at some leading candidates, enabling both Iowa and the nation to conclude that Herman Cain, say, may not be ready for prime time.

For this, we all owe Iowa thanks. It's a good state filled with good people and they deserve to spend the rest of the winter in political peace.

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[TalkingWithYale]

On our TV show last week – filmed in Iowa City - four native Iowans talked about the depiction of them and the state they call home in Bloom’s controversial article, his motives for publishing it, the response its generated across the state, and its national implications with regards to Iowa’s first in the nation voting status.

http://patv.tv/blog/2011/12/18/talking-with-stephen-blooms-observations-oniowa/