Chris Schneider © The Rocky
Iowa voters wait at a John Edwards appearance in Indianola on Dec. 13. Iowa has 3 million people and 200,000 active party members.
Back Roads to the White House
The shadow of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is reflected on his bus as he makes a campaign stop in Des Moines on Dec. 10.
Iowa voters Danny Smith, left, and Shirley Harvey talk with John Edwards' mother, Bobbie, during a campaign event in Indianola. With the hours ticking down, Iowa is like one big convention center, hosting the parties' presidential candidates.
Too young to get involved in politics, James Keagle, 6, draws dinosaurs while riding the Ron Paul bus at the Des Moines Register Republican Presidential Debate in Johnston on Dec. 18.
A large crowd of Iowa voters watches as celebrity Oprah Winfrey campaigns with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in Des Moines on Dec. 8.
Leroy Croghan displays a Hillary Rodham Clinton sticker at an appearance by the Democratic presidential candidate in Council Bluffs on Dec. 16.
People in 49 states should be wondering by now: What's so special about Barb Livingston?
For starters, she's a smart 54-year-old with a snappy wit.
She has one of those occupations that the job counselors never told you about - a spot in the educational services department at a firm that makes valves for oil fields and pipelines.
"It's not a very glamorous product, but it's a big deal," she says.
The same might be said of her office zip code: 50518.
Those five little digits explain a lot.
They explain why, after a long, amusing year, Livingston can barely remember all the big, powerful people who have called to say hello, invited her to private receptions, scheduled one- on-one lunches or otherwise tried to become her best friend.
She's an Iowan - and the Marshall County Republican Central Committee chair, too.
That gives her a sort of magic power. It's the power to make future presidents beg.
"I've been kissed and hugged a lot," she said, recalling meetings with seven Republican presidential contenders - and seeing a few others from afar. "They've said goofy things to entice me."
It hasn't quite worked. No candidate has yet earned Livingston's endorsement going into next Thursday's precinct caucuses.
Still, the candidates keep trying to stay on her good side. They figure she acts as a conduit for would-be Republican caucus participants in one of the more closely-watched counties in the most closely-watched state in the White House race: the first one.
"It's fun," she said, dropping names.
Former New York Gov. George Pataki requested a private luncheon. Arizona Sen. John McCain has pulled her aside for special chats. Former Sen. Fred Thompson singled her out of a crowd to say nice things about her son - a campaign worker. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has sought her out several times and sometimes asks her to introduce him.
And others . . . There are too many to mention.
The attention Livingston gets is a bit over the top. But other average Iowans, especially the most faithful participants in past Republican or Democratic caucuses, are showered with so much special treatment that folks in more forgotten states often wonder: Why Iowa?
Who gave it all this magic power? Is it really representative of the rest of the United States? Are the caucuses all they're cracked up to be?
And, for crying out loud, is this any way to pick the leader of the free world?
Our birthright
Folks in the Hawkeye State defend their first-in-the-nation status like a birthright.
And they answer critics with a question of their own.
What's the alternative? A mega-money, coast-to-coast, television-driven contest dominated by the rich and famous?
No thank you, say folks out in the Iowa hustings.
"Unless we have a regional primary or some other way of doing it, which is unlikely, Iowa or some state is going to be first," said lawyer Glenn Smith, who had a role in the 1976 contest that made this the quadrennial center of the political universe.
"Iowa is a small enough state where you can do retail politicking, meet people one on one," Smith said. "It allows candidates who might not have as much money or name recognition to get that recognition."
That worked in 1976, when Smith was legal counsel to a southern governor folks called "Jimmy Who?"
He snuck up on rivals here. He went door to door, diner to diner, then flooded Iowa with his "Peanut Brigades" at the end.
So what if he finished below "undecided" on caucus night? As the top candidate in the Iowa caucuses, Jimmy Carter gained the momentum to go all the way to the White House.
Since then, many an anonymous, under-funded underdog has had corny dreams about this place. Is this heaven? No. It's Iowa.
In a modern media age, the distinctions between reality and myth, necessity and anachronism, are blurred all the time. But one thing is obvious.
As the days tick away to next week's caucus, there is a bumper crop of Republican and Democratic candidates crisscrossing-crossing the state.
Someone still thinks that Iowa - and all those everyday folks - are relevant as heck.
It all started here
It was a sunny Friday in July when a red, white and blue bus and a conga line of mostly rented cars made an unannounced stop in a place called Webster City.
Sen. Chris Dodd and his chase crew filled most of the good parking spots on the sleepy, downtown drag. At mid-morning, there wasn't a local soul on the sidewalks.
The senator hopped off the bus, made a little small talk with out-of-town reporters and then slipped inside a darkened diner where a handful of area farmers were waiting to give him the third degree.
Dodd's traveling companion for the day, music legend Paul Simon, glanced inside the storefront but then walked off to look for America, taking some of the journalists with him on an unguided walking tour to check out the local architecture.
By the time the little gaggle got back to the diner, the conversation had turned to the economy.
"This country is really run by corporations, so poor people really have no say in it," Simon said, and then he excused himself to make an unassuming entrance into the diner.
Inside, he found the farmers were indeed getting their say. They were telling the Connecticut senator about increasing corporate control of agriculture and the alternative energy programs they hoped would help them make ends meet.
"The windmills do us a lot of good," one man said. "It'd be better if they were locally owned."
A hog farmer wanted Dodd to know that he felt gouged by corporate-owned packing houses.
"We're at the mercy of what the big multinationals want to give us," he said.
Chats like that represent small-town Iowa's royalty from "retail" politicking.
As candidates travel across the state shopping for votes literally one at a time, they have to listen. They have to respond. And in many cases, they're forced to shape their platforms to match what Iowans want or need - not just what the country as a whole needs.
Or else.
This is the way representative democracy is supposed to work. Politicians are supposed to listen to people's needs. And they do.
In Iowa, at least, the people can demand to be heard.
200,000 key votes
In Iowa, legend says, it has to be like this.
The state has 3 million people, sure. But on caucus night, all that counts are the roughly 200,000 active party members - Democrats and Republicans - who typically turn out.
With the right lists of names, a grueling travel schedule for a year or two, and a whole lot of hand sanitizer, it's theoretically possible for a candidate to reach out and touch every single one of them.
Sealing the deal is another question, since every "next President of the United States" is trying to shake all those same hands.
Conventional wisdom - repeated by experts innumerable times since Jimmy Carter's 1976 victory - is that expensive television ads are mostly wasted here.
They reach millions of people (both inside Iowa and in adjoining states) who will not be caucusing for anyone on that cold night in January.
What's more, Iowans say, they're so accustomed to one- on-one attention that they'd never caucus for anyone they hadn't looked in the eyeball a few times at least.
But that hasn't stopped an unprecedented "air war" this cycle. And there's evidence that the television bombardment has had at least momentary effects.
In early 2007, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney began a nonstop bombardment of ads to establish his credentials as a business-minded Washington outsider who really couldn't wait to use his veto pen against anything the Democratic-controlled congress threw at him.
The result: he vaulted into the lead in the polls and took such a commanding lead that big national names, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Arizona Sen. John McCain, practically conceded the state in July.
On the Democratic side, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson used humor to introduce himself to Iowa television viewers. His mock "job interview" ads were so popular that when Richardson would hit the stump, he sometimes started speeches by asking crowds, "Have you seen my ads?"
Just mentioning the ads usually drew hoots of approval. And Richardson gained momentum, reached the edge of double digits in the polls and secured a long-term spot in the "top four."
Romney and Richardson both invested shoe leather in Iowa to back up their advertisements. True. But their ads also erased some of the folklore behind the state's supposed aversion to letting an electronic box tell them whom to like.
The counterpoint: former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, whose face had only appeared in an anti-tax group's ads vilifying him before his stock began rising (like a hot IPO on Wall Street) in the late autumn. Remember, however, that by then he had made quite an impression as the funny, folksy fellow in the never-ending series of debates - on television.
Response to Chicago
Back in the day, Iowa was a place where nobodies didn't need a lot of money or television ads to sneak into the spotlight.
But that wasn't their original purpose.
According to an authoritative history by the Des Moines Register's venerable political columnist David Yepsen, the modern caucuses evolved as a reaction to the Democratic Party's tumultuous convention in Chicago in 1968.
The convention, marred by violent anti-Vietnam War protests, left a bitter, not-so-democratic impression of decisions being made by secret cabals in smoke-filled rooms.
"The Democrats adopted a series of rules requiring that plenty of notice be given about county, district and state conventions - and that party members be given plenty of time to file and debate platform resolutions," Yepsen wrote.
Iowa Democrats decided to hold precinct caucuses in late January so there'd be time to winnow down decisions through the counties before the state convention in June.
Back then, few noticed that the precinct caucuses would happen before New Hampshire's traditional, first-in- the-nation presidential primaries.
One person who did was Gary Hart, the future U.S. senator from Colorado, who was running the long-shot presidential campaign of Sen. George McGovern.
Hart spearheaded an aggressive - and unprecedented - ground campaign in Iowa, which borders McGovern's home state of South Dakota. On caucus night, McGovern couldn't beat the national front-runner, Sen. Edmund Muskie. But his second-place finish was a major surprise that drew the attention of the few national reporters paying attention.
McGovern gained momentum, went on to win his party's nomination, and an Iowa springboard strategy was born.
Carter perfected it in 1976. But even back then, it was without the sort of hoopla that political junkies have come to expect, his old Iowa lawyer, Glenn Smith, remembers.
He did it without many paid staffers, "by working quietly below the surface with politically-active people getting to know him," Smith said. "Jimmy Carter's mother was in my home. Carter would go around with his wife into individual homes with groups of people."
As caucus night approached, he invited an army of out- of-state volunteers - the famed "Peanut Brigade" - to knock on doors in far-flung corners of Iowa. A few of them flopped at Smith's place.
The same thing happens today, but it's tougher for anyone to sneak up on Democratic front-runners like Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton or Sen. Barack Obama when they've already opened more than 30 offices apiece from Council Bluffs to Davenport.
Meanwhile, while Carter was still building his name in intimate little settings right up to the week before the caucuses, some of the big-name, celebrity candidates in 2008 brought hoopla with them from the moment they entered the contest.
And by the spring of 2007, there was hardly a basketball gymnasium or hotel ballroom in the state that hadn't had its rafters shaken by some candidate's amplified stump speech.
Caucus 'critters'
There was an optical illusion in mid-June, when "America's Mayor," Rudy Giuliani, made a pop-in visit to Des Moines.
He brought a large entourage of campaign workers in pin- striped suits. And he was trailed by a big contingent of New York-based media reporters, too.
As far as the television cameras could tell, Giuliani attracted a respectable crowd of a couple hundred folks to hear his "12 Commitments" speech in the ballroom of a riverfront hotel.
But closer inspection showed that a substantial number were really well-known caucus "critters" with little or no chance of actually caucusing for him.
There was a swarm of regular autograph hounds. Among them: a quirky mother-and-son team from Nebraska that became famous for sneaking into news photographs while getting signatures.
There were some tireless self-styled activists - such as John "Dr. Vote" Olsen, a button-collector and autism advocate, and John Strong, a veterans advocate. They popped up everywhere, hoping to get each and every candidate on the record about their pet causes.
And then there were the "franchise" activists - some in matching T-shirts.
National issue-advocacy groups have figured out that Iowans have a pretty good deal. Iowans get more attention than most Americans. So these groups have become "Iowan," with full-time outposts and well-organized efforts to make their presence known at every town hall style meeting.
Among those who had a picture taken with Giuliani that day was Anne "Cookie Mom" Claes, spokeswoman for the group "Iowans for Sensible Priorities." By handing out free cookies everywhere, Claes draws attention to the group's call for military spending cuts in the name of domestic priorities. That's not exactly Giuliani's cup of tea, but so what.
Though candidates like Giuliani sometimes spoke to only a few dozen genuine voters at events, it didn't matter as long as they got the media coverage that came with the appearance.
If the events weren't as intimate and "organic" as they were three decades ago, so be it.
Scenes like these
In Jimmy Carter's Iowa barnstorming days, it might have been hard to imagine the sort of scene that unfolded this month at a convention hall the size of several airplane hangars.
An estimated 18,000 people stood elbow-to-elbow inside the Hy-Vee Center in Des Moines to hear Oprah Winfrey make her first-ever political speech for Obama.
Paid and unpaid campaign workers tried to make sure nobody gets in or out of the event without filling out a card with their name, address, phone number and e-mail address - especially the e-mail address.
The concept is old-school. It's just that in past generations, it was done on note-cards.
But now, there's no escaping the bombardment of campaign mail - sometimes personalized to match a person's issue interests. There's no escaping the steady flow of e-mail updates.
And there is no escaping the robo-calls, the calls from pollsters, and calls from journalists, too.
As of October - before the regular press corps exploded from a few dozen die-hards to several hundred journalistic tourists - a poll found that 7 of every 100 likely caucus-goers said they had been interviewed about the presidential race.
All this special attention can feel like a burden at times, says Livingston, the Marshall County Republican chair.
"People say they get two or three phone calls per evening - a variety of things related to the caucus," she said. "It is kind of too much sometimes in that regard. . . . And I hear people say, 'We'll be glad in two weeks when the (television) commercials are over.' "
So, is it worth the trouble?
"The candidates apparently feel Iowa is worth the trouble," she said.
Stealing the thunder
Before the race for 2008 began, some political experts figured Iowa had been rendered irrelevant.
The number of delegates at stake pales compared to the massive haul just a month later, on Feb. 5, aka "Super-Duper Tuesday," when California and New York - not to mention Colorado - lead a coast-to-coast mini-primary.
After complaints that Iowa - though changing - still isn't racially, ethnically or socially diverse enough to be representative of the country, the major parties added early contests in places like Nevada and South Carolina. Other states, like Michigan and Florida, moved up their dates, hoping to steal Iowa's thunder.
But still, with the hours ticking down, Iowa is like one big square convention center hosting every major Democratic candidate, most of the Republican candidates, and an international media mob expected to reach well past 2,000 by caucus night next Thursday.
Could this be the last time the Hawkeye State gets this sort of attention?
It might take another generation for both the Democratic and Republican party contests to be this wide-open. The last time the race for the White House began without an incumbent president or vice president in the competition was 1952.
Surely, by the time it happens again the "other 49" states will revolt against Iowa's first- in-the-nation status.
So this is it - the last "Big One." Right?
Smith, 63, has heard this talk before - ever since his "Peanut Brigade" days in '76.
So he laughs at an out- of-town reporter covering only his second caucus night.
"There will be excitement on one side or the other," he said.
"You'll be back."
The series
M.E. Sprengelmeyer moved to Iowa in April to follow the presidential campaign at the grass-roots level. His sojourn culminates Thursday night, with the Iowa caucuses.
*
Thursday:
It started as Rudy McRomney, a nickname for Republican powerhouses Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney. Then Fred Thompson jumped in . . . .
*
Friday:
Against high-level advice, Sen. Hillary Clinton put all her chips on the Iowa caucus. Now, she's engaged in a battle with Sen. Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards.
*
Today:
Why Iowa? And is this any way to pick a president? After eight months traveling across the state, Sprengelmeyer finds the answer in the everyday folks who become president-makers once every four years.
A season in Iowa
* Arrival: Easter Sunday in a 1996 Honda Accord (jam-packed)
* Miles driven: 16,226
* Candidates questioned or interviewed: 25 (Democrats Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Gravel, Kucinich, Obama, Richardson; Republicans Brownback, Gilmore, Giuliani, Huckabee, Hunter, McCain, Paul, Romney, Fred Thompson, Tommy Thompson, Tancredo - and don't forget Aranjo, Cort, Cox, Diamond, Gilbert and Mitchell.)
250 days to get Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to answer one question
* Newspaper stories from Iowa: 132
* Blog postings: 300 (and counting)
* Words on the blog: 163,892 (and counting, not including comments)
* The longest day: Oct. 16 (Stayed up all night tallying campaign contributions from Coloradans; left Des Moines at 4 a.m.; napped in corn field outside Brooklyn, Iowa; covered Obama press conference in Fairfax; drove north to Denver, Iowa; then west to Rock Rapids for an Edwards event the next morning. One-day, one-way drive: 480 miles.
* Longest four-day sprint: In April, drove 779 miles to see five candidates hold nine events in 93 hours.
* Craziest drive: Getting lost in the fog (and cigarette smoke) outside Rock Rapids with Edwards' strategist Dave "Mudcat" Saunders riding shotgun.
* Small talk: Bumping into Clinton at a restaurant, discussing the dessert menu.
* Rolling interviews: Tancredo, riding shotgun between West Union and Allison; on the bus with Sen. Chris Dodd (and singer Paul Simon); on the bus with former Sen. John Edwards and wife Elizabeth; in an SUV with former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney.
* Car troubles: One flat tire; frozen/shattered rear window; broken air conditioner/ heater knob; constant engine lights.
* Worst disaster: Two parking tickets
* Biggest surprise: Zero speeding tickets
105 mph (Top speed, somewhere outside Le Mars)
* Favorite Iowa sights: The Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake; the real bridges of Madison County; John Wayne's birthplace; the Pearl Button Museum in Muscatine; International Wrestling Institute and Museum in Waterloo; Future Site of the National Hobo Museum in Britt; Jaarsma's Bakery in Pella; the exit sign for the road leading to the American Gothic house.
* Best finds: A used accordion for sale down the street from Sen. Joe Biden's event in Atlantic; an $11 haircut in Estherville (between Edwards events); a pawnshop with incredible used CD collection in Mason City.
* Overrated: World's Largest Truck Stop, exit 284 on I-80.
* Fuel: Approximately 200 CDs donated by Rocky Mountain News and Scripps Howard News Service colleagues, including: Boxing with God by El Vez; Still Stuck in Your Throat by Fishbone; The Annoying Music Show.
* Worst motel: The one with the body-shaped imprint in the mattress. (Good high-speed Internet, though.)
* Unforgettable: Former Sen. John Edwards' reaction when the Rocky's Des Moines bureau chief introduced himself and asked a question: "You have a bureau in Des Moines?"
How Iowa's caucus systems work
* In 1,784 precincts, local Democrats and Republicans hold small gatherings in school gyms, community centers and homes.
* Participants must be registered voters, though they can switch party affiliation right at the caucus sites. Many 17-year-olds are eligible, as long as they will turn 18 by the date of the general election.
* Caucuses are run by political parties, not the government.
* At REPUBLICAN precinct caucuses, it's a simple straw poll. Voters indicate their choice for president and those results are reported to state party officials, then the media.
* At DEMOCRATIC precinct caucuses, it's more complicated:
* Once folks arrive, they group themselves according to their favorite candidate. Organizers do a head-count of each group, and any group with less than 15 percent of the total in attendance is declared "unviable" and must disband.
* Supporters of each "unviable" candidate have the option of picking a second-choice presidential candidate.
* That's where the fun begins. All the other groups pitch their candidate to the "unviables." Some campaigns even encourage their supporters to bring baked goods to attract converts.
* Once each attendee has joined a "viable" group, the precinct's delegates are awarded proportionally.
* That makes public opinion polls unreliable. In theory, a leading candidate could end up with fewer delegates after low-polling candidates' supporters change groups.
Parent - Job discription 
