The Huckster's Hike to The Top

As a fiery election season promises only to up the ante come Thursday, Mike Huckabee, the affable Baptist pastor turned governor of Arkansas, has overcome a dwarfed campaign budget by meeting Iowa voters one at a time.
The most recent Iowa poll puts Huckabee atop the Republican bout for the ticket, leaving former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney fighting to climb in popularity, despite having 20 times the campaign budget. And a third place Sen. John McCain seems to have overlooked the state that kick-starts the national election. Others like Rudy Giulliani are nothing more than afterthoughts the GOP crowds we’ve seen.
Where expensive ad campaigns, junk mail, phone calls and e-mails buffet the Iowan voting population, supporters of Huckabee, largely Christian fundamentalists and economic conservatives, say money can’t buy their love.
Bill Johnson, of Cedar Rapids Iowa, came to a Huckabee stump in his town only “90 percent sure” the Huckster had his vote. After what appeared to be an extemporaneous concert, where the band played classics like “Mustang Sally” and “Blue Suede Shoes” to huge applause, Johnson was sold.
“Definitely 100 percent now,” he said at the close of the event.
Johnson, who works at Hewlett Packard in Fort Collins much of the year, admits his community is comprised of “conservative church-goers.”
“But you’re voting in a president, not a pastor,” he said.
This time, though, it seems Christian conservatives won’t have to make that distinction.
Huckabee’s received his fair share of criticisms, mostly from party rival Romney, but many supporters say he seemed calm and candid in his response the attacks. And in for Iowa voters, who get a piece of democracy most states can only envy, a little honesty goes a long way.
Rick Bauer, a postman in Cedar Rapids, says he ignores political talk at work, where the American Postal Worker’s Union strongly endorses the Democrats. For him, it’s as simple as being pro-life, anti-tax, having Christian values and small government.
A 54-year-old who live in Iowa most of his life, Bauer seems elated to dedicate his first caucus visit to Huckabee.
Hollywood star and Total Gym spokesman Chuck Norris (better known as Walker in most groups) hearts Huckabee, too. For him, it seems
Huck fans want the only guy on the right who call tell a joke, play the bass guitar and deliver a sermon all at once. And he’s delivering exactly that.
From Des Moines to Cedar Rapids, the older, Republican voters have an energy that rivals the youthful liberals who traveled cross-country to aid the Barack Obama camp – the vanguard on the left.
As far as the Republican ticket goes, my original predictions – for both tickets – seem vindicated in what is likely to be the last poll before the Iowa caucuses.
This will be a history-making election either way.

Part Deux

By J. David McSwane

The Rocky Mountain Collegian

COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa – Our faces sting as we walk the short distance across the motel parking lot, looking for solace from the cold morning breeze. But it’s painful sitting against the stiff, frozen leather of the front seat of our Toyota minivan.

As Erik hurriedly scrapes frost from his windows, leaving no time for the engine to heat, I blow into my shivering hands and reach for the radio dial. I’m in a hurry to ditch the crappy reggae CD to which we were subjected the night before.

Our drive from the motel, a total of about two minutes, took us to the opposite side of the I-29, where we jogged to the warmth of Harrah’s casino. Inside, we found a $9 breakfast buffet.

With a good meal and the prospect of a new day’s paper, I was warming up to this place. Besides, there’s something refreshing about walking into a restaurant and hearing, “Smoking or non?”

The first to return to the booth with a plate-full of eggs, breakfast meats and hash browns, I watched as early-morning gamblers, mostly elderly, trotted toward the buffet. No one here is local, but two underage and unshaven college students blabbing about a flawed political system on a Sunday morning must stand out.

But our alienation was far more tangible the night before.

Biden’s head hunter

After more than a half hour of trolling through the wrong side of town, on the wrong Broadway Blvd., we found the bar.

Erik, again the most interesting character in our group, was the only member who knew what we were doing. Bigg’s Bar is a quiet place to meet even on a Saturday night, our mystery interviewee told him. The rest of us knew that was code for a dive, hole-in-the-wall sports bar. And as we rush inside, more than 20 minutes late, ignoring the “21 and up” sign posted on the steel door, we feel vindicated in our assumption.

Two patrons and the bartender turn their heads down from the Bill Richardson advertisement playing on three TVs above the booze racks – the establishment’s primary light source. The air is stale with cigarette smoke and superficial bar talk, and I already want to leave.

With a quick and awkward nod to the bartender, four of us whip our heads Erik’s way, hoping he knows what this guy looks like. Sure enough, he shakes hands with the only guy at the bar who looks like he has someone to impress.

The man, wearing denim jeans and a white collared shirt under a blue blazer, is trying to impress every registered Democrat in the southwest region of Iowa. But his business casual style, gold-framed glasses and Rolex watch might not be enough to sway this conservative district to his candidate, Joe Biden, and he knows it.

At the Iowa caucuses, every head counts. For tickets like Biden’s, with funding dwarfed by candidates in the national spotlight, this is the only shot they’ve got. Every head counts, in ever precinct.

He offers us a drink, and he seems puzzled when five college students, solemnly eying the selection of booze on the wall behind the bar, decline.

Saturated with all the ins and outs of preparing for the caucus, this guy is a wet dream for five kids covering a national event, but strict campaign policy prohibits him from going on the record. Erik found gold under a mountain we can’t mine.

So, we’ll call him Skyler. It’s Skyler’s job to call and visit every registered Democrat in this town with hope of selling a candidate the media hasn’t found too interesting. Despite the hard sell, he’s “in it to win it.”

As regional field director, Skyler tells the Collegian he works 16 hours a day, seven days a week. The passion in his voice and the conviction in his face as he grips his whiskey drink tells us not to doubt his work load. He came to Council Bluffs six months ago with nothing but a suitcase full of clothes and hope for an underdog candidate.

Under a wall lamp in a dark corner, feet away from the men’s room, Erik asks him the tough questions: “Biden’s falling in the polls, what are you going to do if the Iowa caucus isn’t kind to him? Do you go door to door? Do people tell you off? What do plan to do when this is all over? How do you come back into normal life?”

Skyler, a graduate of the University of Northern Colorado, says he’s full of uncertainty between cigarette drags, but he knows he’ll continue working on campaigns wherever they may be.

The conversation has been going for more than an hour. It’s fascinating to me, but the clock on the wall says it’s nearing midnight. I butt in with a question of my own.

“What time do the liquor stores close?” I ask, as I put out my cigarette in a nearby ashtray.

He laughs.

“No liquor stores here, but I think stores stop selling at midnight,” the headhunter says. “You better get moving.”

Stealing Donuts

With food finally in my stomach, I begin to digest the previous night’s discussion and our subsequent race to a gas station that sells beer. We were relieved to get there with seconds to spare, but now I wish we had more time with the headhunter.

“We’re hanging out with (Skyler) at 10,” Erik says, looking to his left with a grin – the kind of grin that tells me he’s got a plan under that shaggy, brown head.

Erik looks like a young Iggy Pop without a band or a razor blade. Instead, he moves across his stage, pen and notepad flying. He’s quiet, but confident, clever, but it takes a few conversations to pick that up. With his wide, sideways smile that always makes me feel like we’re about to do something illegal, he pulls his pen out and begins to take notes on a napkin he found under my sprinkled donut.

“What are you doing?” I ask, stubbornly pulling my donut from his other hand.

“Getting ready for the interview,” he says, nonchalantly. “I can’t help but feel like I’m going to get raped on this one.”

In his own special way of asking questions, which we’ve coined “Erikisms,” he asks what I might ask our headhunter source. I tell him I want to know how many people he’s “turned,” how they’ve been trained to turn others, and how he prepares them for the clusterfuck that is the Iowa caucus.

He takes notes diligently.

I can’t help but giggle a little. In retrospect, when I hired Erik, I really didn’t take a hard look at his clips. I hired him because of his attention to detail, his persistence in getting a hold of an editor who sucks at returning phone calls and, most of all, because he made me laugh.

He was brought on as a reporter; he’s been promoted three times, and he’s certainly one of the paper’s best journalists. Today, he tells me where to go, and it sounds like we’re hanging out at the Biden campaign office.

As I ask him what exactly he’s looking for at this office, I notice he’s accumulated on his plate more donuts than two of us could eat if we stayed there all day. He’s got sprinkled, filled, glazed, coconut and éclairs.

“We got to sneak as much shit out of here as we can,” he says with a smile that assures me we’re about to do something illegal.

I chew my food in disbelief as he wraps a towering plate of donuts under his jacket, surveys the restaurant and returns to his scrambled eggs.

“Brandon’s going to be thrilled,” he says, unwrapping the donuts before we exit the doors of the casino. “Hopefully, he’ll take good photos without bitching about it.”

Go to collegian.com and rmcollegian.blogspot.com Tuesday to read more about the Iowa headhunters, planning their attack and learning the workings of the caucus that will catapult the 2008 presidential election.

` Editor in Chief J. David McSwane can be reached at editor@collegian.com.

Hunting for heads on the campaign trail

Council Bluffs, IOWA ­– There’s an eerie sort of tension here.
Like a rubber band stretched to its bounds, this state nears its breakout, and it’s an outcome that could change the political landscape for years to come.
Yet, this town seems to be settling dust.
It’s a biting cold at 7 a.m., but cheap motel coffee and a Camel cigarette take the edge off as I pace the foggy pavement off the Days Inn, just off of Interstate 29 and a short trek from the state border.
Anyone who has ever worked with me knows it’s a cold day in hell when I wake before my colleagues; today, I was the first. But this is worse – it’s a cold day in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
This town, first described to me by an instructor reared on the Nebraskan plains as “the place where Nebraskans go to sin,” seems anything but. A casino to the north and a neon-laden strip club to south seem to be decaying remnants of a town whose heyday waned when the drinking age was upped to 21, forever ousting the destination from the roadmaps of restless youth looking for a fix.
It seems now this town is nothing more than a place where Nebraskans go to get the fuck out of Nebraska. One caucus volunteer told us last night this town has become “the trailer park of Iowa.” Either way, I feel like we couldn’t find trouble in this town if we sought it wholeheartedly.
Being a reluctant student journalist fresh off the ennui of Christmas vacation, dragged across the least exciting section of the country by four zealous underlings, I am not too hyped to be hundreds of miles from the bosom of Colorado State University, where attractive young women would be jogging despite the freezing weather. No mountains here, nothing but dirty snow covering the flat landscape.
“This place is worse than Greeley,” I say as I take my last drag and walk through the front entrance, feigning a good morning wave to the front desk clerk.
I return to the room on the second floor where my four colleagues – two on the floor, the other two sharing a full-size bed – are likely snoring to dreams of journalistic accomplishment. We’ve been planning this trip since summer time, and these kids have approached the coverage of the Iowa caucuses with all the fervor and zeal of naïve, young political reporters. And we certainly are.
Staring at the disheveled, warm covers of my own bed, I wish I hadn’t indulged in the nicotine and caffeine – a journalist’s take on Captain Crunch and orange juice. It’s too damn early to be awake, I think as step quietly to the side of our photographer, careful to not disturb the dragon.
Our photog, as we say in the industry, Brandon Iwamoto’s middle name is Tatsuo, which means “dragon” in Japanese, we learned the night before over cheap beer and a 750 of Southern Comfort. While fire doesn’t rush from his lungs, I’m learning quickly that complaints and really horrible reggae music – two things for which have little patience – come as easy at breathing to Tatsuo. But, out of fear of sharing a modest motel bed with another man, his boss no less, he takes the floor, so he’s cool with me.
Sean Reed, our resident smart-ass and budding political theorist, is also snoring, while Aaron Hedge, a news editor known most for his 80’s surfer-dude hair cut, lies in the fetal position at the foot of the bed without a blanket.
The other news editor and the most interesting character in the group, Erik Myers, just woke up.
“Want to get breakfast?” he says as he distances himself from the snoring smart-ass.
Any other time, I’d say no. But running out of patience with the incessant and bombastic Z’s that woke me, I’m keen to spend some of the Collegian’s money. Running on three hours of sleep, and preparing a day campaign organizers with all their hopes invested with presidential candidate Joe Biden, I figured I needed more stimulants.
But what we’d find in this rural slice of Iowa four days before the launch of a potentially history-making national election would rekindle my interest in American politics.