The American Spectator

DES MOINES -- Every four years, politicians and the media swarm this small Midwestern state and shower its voters with attention and compliments, but very few people have the courage to admit the simple truth: Iowans are largely apathetic about politics, and they don't deserve the disproportionate influence they have in choosing the leader of the free world.

The amount of access that the average Iowan has to presidential candidates leading up to the caucuses is simply absurd. Last Friday, Mike Huckabee spoke at the Pizza Ranch on Main Street in Pella, Iowa, a quintessential small town in the southern part of the state. Huckabee described the town as "one of those places where you feel like you've moved back into the neighborhood where Ozzie and Harriet could live."

While Huckabee was speaking on one side of Main Street, Fred Thompson appeared at the Smokey Row Coffee House a few blocks away. The next morning, Mitt Romney visited the same coffee shop, and boasted that it wasn't his first visit to the lovely Dutch-settled town with a population of 10,245.

At campaign stops, candidates from both parties say that Iowans are doing a great service for democracy by vetting them for the rest of the country.

"Boy, the folks of Iowa, you love politics don't you?" Romney said in Pella. "You guys are just amazing. You really do the nation a service by getting to know each of us, and learning about what we believe, learning about our heart, and our character, and deciding who ought to lead our nation."

At a rally in Des Moines on Sunday night, Barack Obama told the crowd admiringly, "You've lifted the hood, you've kicked the tires, you've taken all of the candidates out for a test run."

The media often echo this romanticized notion of Iowans as savvy consumers who carefully evaluate candidates.

THE REALITY IS QUITE different. Even though candidates in both parties will have together spent hundreds of days in the state and doled out more than $30 million to air more than 50,000 television advertisements, only one out of ten eligible Iowans is expected to participate in a caucus on Thursday.

Even some of those who attend political events are not very knowledgeable about the candidates or major issues. I spoke to one man who told me that he thought Rudy Giuliani was "okay as governor" and another who told me that he was undecided between Huckabee and Romney, but he couldn't say what the attributes or drawbacks were of either of them even though he had seen both candidates speak within the prior 24-hour period. He also said he didn't know what issues were important to him.

To be sure, there are Iowans who are closely following the election, but they are small in number relative to the voting age population, especially considering the amount of attention that is heaped upon the state. The well-informed voters appear in news accounts because reporters need tight, coherent quotes for their stories. "I don't knows" and blank stares do not make for good copy or television.

But the effect of filtering out uninformed voters is that it doesn't provide Americans with a truly accurate picture of the political process in Iowa.

One of the obstacles to Iowans' learning more about the issues is that much of the focus is on who spent how much time in the state. One Huckabee supporter told me he couldn't support Fred Thompson because he hasn't spent enough time in Iowa. The fact that Thompson has been virtually camping out in the state for the past few weeks was too little, too late, evidently.

The Des Moines station KCCI opened its newscast on Saturday night following the New England Patriots game with a series of reports on candidates touring the state. The brief segment on Giuliani's visit didn't report on what he spoke about. Rather, it was an opportunity for the newscaster to remind viewers several times that Giuliani was leaving the state and would not return.

When candidates do show up, they are often greeted with shrugs by jaded Iowans. On Saturday, the Ottumwa Courier ran stories on visits by Huckabee and Thompson -- on page A7. The front-page local news included a story on a snowstorm and another headline:

"Cardboard ban officially goes into effect beginning Tuesday."

IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE that voters would want to know that candidates care about them enough to visit and work hard for their votes, but Iowans are so spoiled by all the attention given to them, that it has gone to their heads.

Before the Romney event in Pella, I was minding my own business, tape recorder and notebook in hand, waiting for the candidate to make his way through the crowd and begin his speech. A grinning young attendee noticed me and taunted, "I bet I get to interview him before you do!"

In offering an idealized portrait of Iowans (and out of fear of being seen as elitist), political reporters will often talk about how real Americans in Iowa have better things to do with their lives than obsess over politics. These real Americans would rather be watching the Orange Bowl on Thursday night than voting. This patronizing attitude is unfair both to Iowans and to the rest of America.

While it's easy to understand how the political process can turn off voters, for all of the silliness that comes along with campaigns, the bottom line is at the end of this crazy circus, one person will emerge to become the most powerful leader in the world.

The president will help guide tax and spending policy, appoint justices to the Supreme Court who will make rulings for decades, determine under what circumstances America uses military force, and lead the nation through whatever crises may emerge in an uncertain world.

Voters often complain that the media control the political process, but Iowans have the unique opportunity to bypass the media and see all of the candidates up close, and even ask them questions directly. When next fall rolls around, many voters will complain about the lack of alternatives to the two major candidates, but because Iowa goes first, its voters have a chance to choose from a wide pallet of candidates in both parties.

Iowa's status in presidential politics has real consequences. Because a given candidate may be forced to drop out after Iowa, voters in other states who may like that candidate will be denied the ability to vote for him based on what Iowans decide. It also prompts so-called small government Republicans to embrace farm subsidies and Democrats to advocate increasingly protectionist trade policies.

The power that Iowans exert over the selection of our president would perhaps have some justification if voters here lived up to the stereotype of being active and discerning. But if after all of the time, money, and energy candidates have concentrated on the state, nine out of ten voters stay home on caucus night, they will not have kept their end of the bargain.

Philip Klein is a reporter for The American Spectator.

This review appears in the October 2007 issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print edition, click here.

The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington
By Robert D. Novak
(Crown Forum, 662 pages, $29.95)

"I am not a person who is easy for a lot of people to like," Bob Novak writes early in this not-massive-enough memoir. But how can anyone ever dislike someone who never fails to make an impression, and always with an economy of words and never by shooting his mouth off?

I remember the first time I met him. It was early June 1983, in a conference room at the Army-Navy Club in Washington, where my magazine was hosting a dozen or so visiting British and European journalists and such eminences as Novak, Chris Matthews, and Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post had kindly come by to brief them on U.S. politics. One problem: the visitors were nowhere to be found. "I'm getting angry, I'm getting angry," Novak soon enough let on, drumming his fingers on the table in front of his chair and giving me a look that could kill. The session was to have begun promptly at 1 p.m. Our visitors didn't stagger in from their three-beer lunches until about 10-15 minutes later, oblivious to the insult they'd caused. Fortunately, the storm clouds lifted, Novak gave an expert presentation (certainly better than Matthews's hammering away at "the gender gap"), answered questions, and soon was off to his next designation.

One thing was immediately clear. This was a no-nonsense professional, someone who works very hard, can't afford to waste time, yet is also generous with it, as I've had occasion to observe many times since. Whenever I come across Michael Kinsley's famous slam at Novak, "Underneath the ass---- is a nice guy, but underneath the nice guy is another ass----," I cringe, not just for Kinsley's sake, who for all we know was projecting, but for Novak's, who has probably suffered more abuse than any journalist in Washington history, the recent Plame nonsense being merely the latest example. Typically, though, in a memoir that has some wonderfully blunt things to say about numerous Washington personages, Novak never responds to Kinsley in kind. Not even close. Underneath it all is a well-mannered gentleman.

And a gentleman reporter keeps most everything tight to the vest (his first came with the three-piece suit he purchased in frigid Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1960). It's been like that for five decades and counting. Consider a small recent dinner for Fred Thompson attended by Novak and George Will, among others. The discussion was political, cordial if cool. If not for this memoir, one would not have known that Thompson was a source of his during Watergate -- they'd first met at a Washington watering hole -- or that the fiercely competitive Novak has been a longtime admirer of Will, and in 1972 had unsuccessfully recommended Will to succeed David Lawrence at the Publishers-Hall syndicate. Rejecting Will's sample columns, Novak's contact at the syndicate told him, "The words are too long, the sentences are too long, the paragraphs are too long, the whole damn columns are too long. Bob, it's not a newspaper column."

Novak knew better, of course. Already by 1972 he'd been in the newspaper business for more than 20 years, including a senior year at the University of Illinois spent working for the Champaign-Urbana Courier (which almost cost him his senior year -- but that's another story). A temporary AP gig in Omaha led to full-time political reporting in Lincoln and then in Indianapolis, a transfer to Washington in 1957 and a year later a move to the Wall Street Journal, whose presence in Washington grew exponentially once it had Novak to cover the Senate and the 1960 presidential campaign. In 1961 Vermont Royster offered him a leading editorial position in New York that in 1963 would go to Robert Bartley. By then he had accepted Rowland Evans's offer to join him as his partner in a double-bylined syndicated column for the New York Herald-Tribune. An instant hit, initially it ran six mornings a week (among book and other writing projects, and soon enough, television, thanks above all to the pioneering work of Ed Turner). Even today, almost 15 years after Evans's retirement, Novak files three columns a week.

INSIDER WASHINGTON REPORTING has not seen anything like it, providing new information in every offering and requiring its authors to be no less politically savvy than its subjects and cultivating sources relentlessly. I lost track of the individuals Novak mentions as important sources -- at times he comes across as a director of central intelligence continually tapping into many networks of informants, knowing all the while that some might be more self-serving or devious than others. Some would arrange drops. Others would meet only in dank restaurants. And once in a while one of them would get Novak into trouble.

In one such instance, a good friend of his passed along a long memorandum from an off-the-record lunch in New York with Washington Post-Newsweek executives at which Secretary of State Dean Rusk heatedly denounced "pseudo-intellectual" critics of the Vietnam War. It was too juicy not to use, even though Novak had to lie to protect his source-who happened to be a Washington Post reporter-and even though Katharine Graham, president of the Washington Post Company, had attended the lunch. Imagine her surprise when in her own newspaper on the morning of October 13, 1967, she read about Rusk's off-the-record remarks to "a select group of New York executives." First thing that day, Novak received a frosty call from her. "She told me that I had caused her personal humiliation," and said to him "our personal relationship is now at an end." That was no skin off Novak's nose-he had met her for the first time only several weeks earlier when, at LBJ's request, she had called Evans and Novak in to ask them to be nicer to him. Novak just didn't want to see their professional relationship come to an end. A profuse, 500-word letter of apology from Novak helped save his neck. The Washington Post was and remains the Novak column's most important outlet.

Other sources Novak liked he later learned were snakes -- David Stockman, for instance, who it turned out was alternating Saturday breakfasts with Novak and William Greider, author of the notorious Atlantic article in which Stockman mocked the supply-side policies he was supposedly championing. "You must think I'm Judas," Stockman said to Novak, in the last conversation they ever had. At least they had one. Bill Kristol, a source and friend for 17 years, Novak writes, never returned a call as promised after Novak's patriotism was questioned in National Review on the outbreak of the Iraq war, and when asked about Novak on C-Span during the Plame hysteria, replied, "Novak is a friend -- [pause] -- an acquaintance." One can sense this washing of hands hurt Novak more than all the physical pain he's withstood in his long career -- since 1981 alone he has survived spinal meningitis, two cancer operations, and two broken hips. He's a very tough guy, but even tough guys have real feelings.

You won't be able to put this book down.

Wlady Pleszczynski is The American Spectator's editorial director and editor of this website. This review appears in the October 2007 issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print edition, click here.