Leaving the Heartland

Biden embraces South Carolina for our nation’s first political contest. Here’s my discussion with Charles Madigan.

Jim: So, President Biden intends to diminish Iowa’s political fortunes by replacing its notorious political caucuses with contests that are more representative of the population that helped elect him. Wow. That should make the late Mike Royko happy. The legendary Chicago columnist found it absurd to draw conclusions about national elections on Iowa gabfests that involved about as many voters as in three wards in Chicago. I have a history with caucuses, Charlie. I worked at the Des Moines Register when the Iowa caucuses first appeared on the political stage. None of us really knew how to cover these eccentric gatherings. Jim Flansburg, the Register’s colorful top political reporter, sat me down and explained the whole caucus process. Then he sent me to a cover one. I didn’t find the caucus representative of much. But I was a young reporter. So, I sat in the audience and listened to candidates talk to voters. I’ll never forget one prospective candidate who stood at the podium and said: “I just came out here to expose myself.” I knew I was at a caucus full of humorless Republicans. No one else laughed. Flansburg told me the process would revolutionize national politics. He was right. The caucuses helped put President Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1976 and became a fixture on the national political scene. I think Biden’s doing the right thing by proposing that South Carolina take Iowa’s spot. Iowa’s full of corn, pigs, soybeans, and predominantly white people. It’s not representative of the nation’s voters. It should be demoted. What do you think Charlie? 

photo by Austin Goode

Charlie: Dang, I loved going to Iowa! It was the first real chance we had since the political season to get out of town unsupervised and take a neck deep bath in the mythology of American politics. That would mean a couple of hammered nights with politicos of all stripes in not so fancy rural bars. Some smiles from locals who were impressed with your press credentials, that was nice. Next morning early you would head out into the vast farmland of the place and look for people to talk to. Feed lots, there were people to talk to there, but mostly about...feed! Stop at a farmhouse and chat up a guy standing by a bale of hay. Right away, you would notice this farmer in the middle of nowhere had his own foreign policy and attitude about all kinds of things, most of them unrelated to anything. When you wrote about him, you would say he was “crusty” in one of those rural adjectives that is either related to frequency of taking baths, or maybe the Iowa version of New Hampshire’s “flintiness.” I don’t know. I tried to be honestly journalistic about it, but in a lot of cases, there was nothing there. We never wrote that. We always wrote about the old family farm and how bad things were and how these damned politicians were this and that and so on. Then you would go to some rural event and realize, even cooked out of doors, there was nothing good to say about a corn dog.

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The whole place was an object lesson, in retrospect, about what was wrong with politics and what was wrong with journalism, a twofer!

On the other hand, the people were very nice and eager to welcome city folks to the country. That may be why Iowa always held a sacred role (until now) on the campaign trail. It was the last place you could expect people to talk truthfully before you moved down the road to the glories of city campaigning.

A final measure, dive into history and it’s like visiting a bunch of people who were reading and writing from the same script.

And it was a script.

Jim: I agree, Charlie. The caucuses brought out the best and worst in politics and journalism. Iowa’s changed along the way, too, and not for the better. It’s a different place from the one that soared to political fame with the caucuses. When reporters starting flocking there in the 1970s and 80s, Robert Ray, an eminently sensible Republican governor, commanded the respect of both parties regardless of their differences. He got things done by forging deals. The state’s congressional delegation was evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Iowa had an outstanding statewide newspaper, the Des Moines Register, that, I believe, had a moderating influence on its politics. And it had an admirable public education system that produced an unusually informed electorate. Things started to change as the caucus process matured. The newspaper industry’s problems forced the family that owned the Register to sell to it Gannett, a newspaper chain, which began producing a paper of much less substance to readers in an area confined to Des Moines. Eventually, social media dominated the news with the premium it places on opinion and misinformation. Democrats started to struggle, the religious right flexed its muscles and Iowa ended up with a more lopsided political landscape, one that has leaned increasingly radically right. It’s current governor, Kim Reynolds, reeks of Trumpism. And then there’s the Democrats. They could have dealt with the caucus problems long ago, but they were too mesmerized by TV klieg lights and internet clicks. Laura Belin, who writes Bleeding Heartland, the best political column in Iowa, recently did a great take on the Democratic flubs, which was also published by the Iowa Writers Collaborative, a group of writers that focuses on Iowa issues. And to affirm how much the state has changed, the credentialing arms of the governor and legislature’s offices are trying to deny Laura press credentials because they don’t like her tough minded brand of journalism. Punishing a journalist for trying to do a good job is shabby treatment. I would have expected more from a state whose slogan in the seventies was “a place to grow.” When Mike Royko asked his fictional character Slats Grobnik what to do about Iowa, Slats had a pretty good answer: go south.

—James O’Shea and Charles Madigan

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune.

Charles Madigan is a writer and veteran foreign and national correspondent for UPI and the Chicago Tribune, where he also served as a senior writer and editor. He examines news reporting, politics and world events.