Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
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CARROLL — This is shaping up to be a landmark political run in west-central Iowa. Never have so few had so much influence.
In a matter of days in Carroll, a city of 10,000 and the commercial hub of a wide swath of western Iowa, we have had presidential candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney in town. John Edwards will be here tomorrow. I just had coffee and chocolate-chip cookies with Mike Huckabee’s wife, Janet, and we expect to see Mrs. Obama at Coffee World tommorrow morning.
The intense push in western Iowa, particularly among Democrats, is result of the disproportionate influence we wield in Iowa caucuses. In short, western Iowa will determine the Democratic finish here — and most likely the next president of the United States.
In an interview, Obama noted that he was not only in Carroll for a second time but that he scheduled several other stops west of Interstate 35.
“Western Iowa and the rural areas can’t be ignored, not only because there are going to be a lot of caucus-goers that add up when you look at the entire region, but also because of the issues that are facing western Iowa and rural Iowa,” Obama said.
Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, who attended the event here, told Iowa Independent the attention being paid to Carroll and western Iowa reflects the importance of this part of the state in the caucuses.
“I think everybody recognizes this is a huge battleground,” Axelrod said. “I think it will have a disproportionate impact on the outcome.”
For his part, Biden, chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spent about two hours one night recently with 25 people in Lohrville and another 90 minutes in Carroll Wednesday with 75 people.
“I think western Iowa is going to play a gigantic role,” Biden told Iowa Independent. “That’s why I’ve been here a lot. What I find is that people are not looking for bumper-sticker answers. This is the most incredibly informed electorate. I mean, it’s amazing.”
As I explained in a presentation to the Carroll Area Development Corp. earlier this month there are many and varied reasons for the crush of media attention and candidate visits in Carroll.
Some of it is based on political and professional connections developed through the years. We are also a city that is at once big enough and small enough for what the campaigns want with appearances – and what the media look for in terms of optics.
But in the end it boils down to numbers.
In rural stretches of staunchly Republican western Iowa, for example, it takes far fewer caucusgoers to earn state Democratic delegates – the real scoreboard in Iowa – than in liberal strongholds like Iowa City or other more urban areas..
In 2004, it took 30 caucusgoers in Carroll County to elect one Democratic state delegate, compared with 79 in Johnson County.
This explains why we have had more Democratic candidates in the area, including that remarkable recent Saturday where Obama appeared in Audubon and Hillary Clinton in Sac City within just hours — and a 20-hour stretch were we had Obama, Clinton and Richardson in Carroll.
Several months ago, U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said candidates – both Republican and Democratic – will be making fatal political mistakes if they ignore rural and western Iowa. He suspected former U.S. Sen. John Edwards’ strong standing in early Iowa polls was a measure of his commitment to spending more time in rural areas and reaching out to western Iowa.
“I’ve said to every single one of them, `I know your advisers are going to say go to Des Moines and go to Waterloo and go to Cedar Rapids and just keep that circuit going,’” Harkin said. “But, you know, the first candidate that really gets out there and gets involved in rural Iowa, to let the small towns and communities know that he or she cares about them, factors them in, wants their support, that could tip the scales in the caucuses.”
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