Distinguishing YearlyKos Campaign Events from Iowa Campaign Events

Big, important YearlyKos info-dump is forthcoming, I think.  Until I get that up, I thought it might be interesting to talk a bit about the differences between seeing a candidate in Iowa and seeing a candidate at a progressive bloggers’ convention.  This was going to be long and developed, but it turned out that there weren’t too many distinctions to draw.  Here are the notable ones:

DECORUM

In Iowa, crowds generally know what candidate appearances are supposed to look like.  Elsewhere, that isn’t always the case.  Iowans don’t usually jump over each other and wave their hands in the air wildly in an effort to get called on.  Bloggers, at least from what I saw, sometimes do that.

I went to Sen. Chris Dodd’s “breakout session” after the “Presidential Leadership Forum” ended, because I have seen pretty much all of the candidates who were there multiple times, and I wanted to hear if Dodd mentioned his appearance on O’Reilly (his express purpose in the appearance was to defend YearlyKos), because at least that would be news.  He did mention it a few times and drew a bit of applause for it each time, but it wasn’t the focal point of his talk by any means.  About thirty minutes into his session, though, a staffer loudly whispered the standard “We have time for one more question, Senator” wrap-it-up notice.  When that happened, someone actually stood up and yelled at Dodd, saying, “Come on, Senator!  Another thirty minutes to be President of the United States!”  In Iowa, crowds seem to respect campaign schedules, because most people in them have — at one time or another — received the fuzzy end of the scheduling lollipop, waiting around for hours longer than expected before getting to see candidates.  If we hold someone up in West Liberty, we know that the folks in Marion — or wherever else a candidate might be going on a particular day — get screwed.  So we respect it, and we don’t blame the candidate for a tight campaign schedule.  (Also, I mean, come on.  Nobody really has a reason to demand an extra half hour of Chris Dodd.)

PANDERING

People across the country think that candidates come to Iowa to pander, pander, pander.  Aside from Bill Richardson (who, it has been fairly well established, is Mr. Pander-bear), I don’t think Iowans expect candidates to pander very much, and I don’t think candidates really do it when they come here.  Not so in front of the YearlyKos crowd.  Whether or not candidates were really changing their positions when they spoke to us, they were definitely emphasizing points that they thought our crowd needed to hear from us instead of answering questions directly or emphasizing the important themes of their campaigns.  Every candidate found some way to work Net Neutrality into their speeches; and, even more panderbearishly, every candidate actually claimed they would hire an official White House blogger — a position which, if created, will cause trouble for the White House and will almost certainly not satisfy the blogerati.  A colleague of mine sitting next to me joked that Edwards’s answer to the WH blogger question should have been, “Sure, I’ll hire a White House blogger, and then I’ll be forced to fire her.”  I would’ve both laughed at and believed that answer.

In contrast to that kind of pandering, Iowa doesn’t appear to have any equivalent issues this time around — at least on the Democratic side.  The West Wing made fun of Iowans for requiring candidates to take “the ethanol pledge,” but I don’t think I have heard a single Democrat say that ethanol is going to be a long-term solution to our energy problems, and I don’t even think most Iowans believe that it is.  Sure, we challenge candidates on the issues that matter to us, but I think we have good BS detectors, and pandering usually falls flat.

QUESTIONING

The content of the questions asked of candidates — at least in my breakout session with Dodd and based on anecdotes passed along to me from folks who were in other breakout sessions — seemed fairly similar to questions asked in Iowa.  A lot of questions about infrastructure, both transportation (e.g., the Minnesota bridge disaster) and electronic (e.g., rural broadband access), and a lot of constitutional questions (unitary executive, habeas corpus, separation of powers, etc.).  And of course people talked about the war.

EASILY IMPRESSED

Crowds in Iowa and at YearlyKos were similarly easy to impress.  There was a lot of applause over the weekend.  Clappers were not always supporters of the candidate for whom they were clapping, and that seemed fine.  Everyone felt very friendly when the people on stage agreed with them, and I think that’s similar to Iowa audiences I’ve observed.

But YearlyKos attendees were a lot more willing to boo and hiss.  They did it a lot.  They booed when Richardson said he supported a balanced budget amendment, for instance, and that’s a line that either gets him applause or polite sideways glances in Iowa.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I was really hoping for big differences between the Iowa Edwards and the Bloggerati Edwards, or between bumpkin Obama and Chi-town Obama, and I wanted to write it up and have a really interesting story to show all the new friends I made over the weekend.  Unfortunately, the Democratic candidates don’t fake it in Iowa as much as I expected.