How Carter Won the First Battle

...He would listen long, no matter who was talking to him, important politician or crackpot on the street...

...59, in the basement recreation room of the Simpson United Methodist Church...

...I’m relaxed and confident...

...We realized from the outset,” said Jordan much later, “that what we were going to do was very unconventional-a man running for office who had no forum, who was not an incumbent, who was not from the traditional breeding ground of American politics, who was a Southerner...

...Jimmy Carter did in fact talk to the people, often at great length...

...So complex were they,in fact, that dry-run caucuses were scheduled around the state to familiarize Democrats with the system and to encourage participation...

...At the summer’s end, an opportunity presented itself that was the first tangible Carter triumph, and first solid evidence of his diligent thoroughness...

...To elect a county delegate, a candidate would have to claim at least 15 per cent of the precinct caucus vote, or in this case, roughly five votes...

...their focus was squarely on Muskie as he collected big-name endorsements en route to what nearly everyone thought would be a routine first-ballot nomination...

...A short, mustachioed fellow with the look of a cocky desperado about him, Kraft had helped engineer the election of New Mexico’s Govenor Jerry Apodaca, and he knew the business of grassroots organizing...

...When he ran for governor in ’66 and lost, and then decided to run in ’70, a lot of people, myself included, tried to [dissuade him and] talk him into running for lieutenant governor or commissioner of agriculture...

...It was by all odds an insignificant gauge of over-all Democratic strength in Iowa, but it was the only show in town-the only hard bit of political information about the 1976 Democratic race available for the press and television to latch on to, and it made news in Iowa, especially because the “winner” was an obscure one-term former governor from a Deep South state who had no business making any splash at all there...

...The things you can control are your own organization, your own fund-raising...

...Apple, Jr., wrote that Carter “appears to have taken a surprising but solid lead” in Iowa’s delegate race...

...In the memo, dated August 28, 1975, Kraft wrote: “It is past time that we begin to devote to Iowa the money and manpower that that crucial state requires...

...Once we became convinced we had a good shot, Iowa became the place...

...Perhaps more than any other campaigner in recent time, Carter could truly say that he was out among the people, conversing with them, and learning from them...

...Jimmy Carter ran as the longest of long shots, and whatever favorable reaction he generated was gravy...

...with the news...

...On the night of January 19 the Carter mission paid off...

...He would call on a farmer in the morning, talk for a while, stay for lunch, then come by again a few weeks later...

...Well in advance of the first precinct caucuses scheduled for January 19, 1976, Whitney and his committee laid plans for delegate selection in accordance with the new and complex national party rules...

...The field would be bunched up and nobody would break out of this pack in 1975...

...As the Father knoweth me, even so I know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep...

...Most of the Carter people said they had met the candidate personally or one of his family, and they liked his style...

...Kraft worked the state like a local precinct visiting 110 cities and towns between Carter’s own visits, which were marked by not only speaking engagements but also casual drop-bys in the middle of nowhere...

...It was forever a source of frustration for his staff that this man who insisted always on being on time-in order not to give offense or, putting it positively, to show he cared-would stop in a crowd and start a dialogue with anyone who asked him a question...

...He asked of voters the same “leap of faith” that is at the core of religious belief, and to a remarkable degree they gave it to him...

...We knew the thing was going to be covered...

...Though the dinner was expensive-$50 a coupleTom Whitney confided to Kraft that Democrats would be admitted to balcony seats for $2 apiece...

...The reality of a presidential campaign,” he wrote in a woeful misunderstanding of the dynamics of the system, “is the delegate count, but no significant number of delegates will be selected until March” (in the Massachusetts primary, presumably...

...But it was not Jimmy Carter’s nature to forget any state...

...Where we were perceptive,” he said, “was we knew not only that we couldn’t get you [the national press] but the others couldn’t get you either...

...All the Trappings In late October the state Democratic Party held a large JeffersonJackson Day fund-raising affair at Iowa State University in Ames, just north of Des Moines, to which all the prospective presidential candidates were invited...

...We’ll solicit money but it [the Iowa campaign] can’t pay for itself...

...the premise was that if he could ignite a spark with the people, the press would have to come around...

...And when he left, he had his own church b e 1 i evers, thoroughly committed to him, willing to work with a zest and dedication approaching his own...

...Hamilton Jordan and his associates grasped this truth early and acted on it repeatedly...

...In the same memo to Carter supporters, Kraft wrote, “Have the bumper sticker on whatever you drive to Ames...

...In August 1975, five months before the Iowa voting, Tim Kraft decided he should move into the state full time...

...You are aware of the medialpolitical significance of Iowa’s January 19 precinct caucuses...

...There are things in a political campaign you can control and things you can’t...

...This article is adapted from his new book, Marathon (The VikingPress...

...And so persist he did, almost with a vengeance and, beyond that, with an unshakable conviction of right...

...And this self-education was perhaps an element in his steadfast conviction that categorical answers were not always the best, that people did not always come down squarely on one side or another of an issue, but often had mixed views...

...He would respond fully, and then ask, “Have I answered your question...

...Yes, in a sense,” he said, in a response that would be heard from many a Carter voter in the year ahead...

...We might not have known much about anything else, but we did know local media...

...Jimmy’s nature is to run a total effort everywhere,” Jordan went on...

...Kraft, seizing on this development, quietly mobilized his growing forces to generate a show of strength for Carter that would be noticed by the national press-and, he hoped, by the nation’s public as well, far in advance of the New Hampshire primary...

...Nearly three months before the first caucuses of 1976, Carter had grabbed the media spotlight...

...This guerrilla tactic was foiled initially when the Register distributed the ballots at the door to full-paying guests, but some of the Carter twodollar types infiltrated anyway, slipping down to the floor and appropriating ballots along with suppers of fried chicken...

...Because of Jimmy’s commitment to the thing we never spent a lot of psychic energy worrying about who we were ultimately going to face...

...But don’t tell me that Iowa, Oklahoma [also an early Caucus state] , New Hampshire, and Florida should be treated like any of the 46 states...

...Through the early going, he was mired among the alsorans in the Gallup and other publicopinion polls, not moving up until his primary campaign successes...

...As the other candidates moved into Iowa-Harris, Udall, and Jackson, then Bayh and Shriver-they seldom found a place where the velvet pitch of Jimmy Carter had not been heard or conveyed by proxy by his growing legion of workers...

...Twelve of the 35 made a Carter group...

...Some reporters, to their credit, had recognized and chronicled early the Muskie slide and McGovern climb, but this time around, in 1976, if there were going to be early signals, the fourth estate was going to be on the scene en masse to catch them...

...How Carter Won the First Battle by Jules Witcover One day in late February 1975 Jimmy Carter and his sidekick, Jody Powell, motored over from Nebraska into Iowa for a testimonial dinner for Marie Jahn in Le Mars, just north of Sioux City...

...Carter had been discussing with him where he would go, and now Carter told Kraft: “I guess we won’t have to send you to Alaska now...

...I’m a lot more sure of myself...

...The state’s Democrats have always prided themselves on being in the forefront of reform, and in Tom Whitney they had a young and ambitious chairman who saw the potential for national attention in the 1976 political calendar...

...Carter polled 9.9 per cent of 5,762 persons voting-more than any other active candidate achieved...

...This approach made sense for another reason: it fit right in with the way .Carter did things...

...68 Flansburg was impressed with Carter, and said so in print...

...Jahn was retiring after 38 years as Plymouth County recorder and Carter, just retired himself as governor of Georgia, was the guest speaker...

...We were going to have to prove ourselves early, and the early primaries and even the caucuses were going to have a disproportionate amount of influence in the media...

...Jules Witcover is a columnist for The Washington Star...

...And like a missionary so convinced of the Word that he was confident his new church would stand against all manner of secular pressures, Jimmy Carter openly disdained the demands of the infidel press that he speak in specifics, that he say exactly what his general proposals would do, would cost...

...And that kind of commitment does not allow you to say, ‘Well, we may not run in these ten or 15 states...

...Harold Brady, host of the affair, was more specific...

...Bayh’s forces depended on labor to come through for them and were disappointed...

...In Iowa, he talked about what 260 days on the road in 1975 had done for him: “I feel better than I did a year ago...

...I guess that’s what I’m here for...

...The media’s seizing upon Iowa, although the state chose only 47 of 3,008 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, was both understandable and defensible...

...You can’t control issues and events and who your opponents are, or what they do or what they say about you...

...All over Iowa that night, that experience was being repeated...

...I went over to see him in ’67 or ’68 and I said, ‘Jimmy, you should be the governor, but you know, this guy Carl Sanders just can’t be defeated.’ And he told me in his living room, ‘If I don’t get but two votes, mine and yours, I’m going to run for governor.’ “He made that same kind of total commitment to the presidential campaign...

...Build yourself a case,” Jordan told him...

...And he suggested that “one probably could drift down from the balcony onto the floor and vote” in the poll...

...He put out a press release, but the Des Moines Register buried the story...

...Greg Schneiders, Carter’s efficient and outspoken personal aide, a 29-year-old former Washington restaurant and bar operator, took the call and summoned the candidate, who talked to Tim Kraft...

...It was an almost missionary quality: no soul was not worth saving, nor beyond redemption, if only Carter persisted...

...we may need them for the [straw] hats...

...and James Maloney, auditor of Polk County (Des Moines...

...And not only Carter engaged in this Good Shepherd exercise...

...He too had been won over by Carter’s political evangelism...

...his wife Rosalynn, his sons, and his sister, Ruth Stapleton, a sexy blond mother who was also a professional evangelist, all worked Iowa like some foreign mission whose natives had not found salvation, but only needed to hear the word...

...It has been argued] that there are only X amount of materials for 50 states and, accordingly, they must be rationed...

...If the farmer wasn’t home, he would leave a handwritten note pinned to the front door that said: “Just dropped by to say hello...

...The major newspapers immediately perceived this first solid sign of Carter’s strength in Iowa...

...In 2,530 individual precinct caucuses in Iowa, in schoolrooms, church basements, libraries, and private living rooms, Democrats gathered to start the process that led to the national convention in New York’s Madison Square Garden in July...

...When the press and the networks began to descend on Des Moines right after New Year’s Day, one lament was heard repeatedly...

...A great irony about the Carter strategy is that it was essentially the same one that Muskie used in 1972, and that helped to bring him down...

...Powell showed the story to Carter and the two talked about Iowa’s potential, and the good reception he had just received...

...And I like Carter’s sincerity, and maybe I sense there’s support for the man here...

...They included James Schaben, the unsuccessful 1 9 74 gubernatorial nominee...

...I prefer Harris on most things...

...We felt the sequence of the primaries and the new federal election law could make winners out of some candidates and losers out of others,” Jordan said, “and candidate attrition would take place very early...

...There, 35 Democrats out of 937 registered in the precinct, one of the city’s largest, showed up to select Seven delegates to the county convention...

...We were seeing if we could find a place to surprise before New Hampshire, and the people of Iowa seemed to be our kind of folks...

...Carter, working from Atlanta rather than Washington, has made dramatic progress while attention was focused on the scramble for liberal primacy” among Udall, Bayh, Harris, and Shriver...

...I sent out a mailing to 600 or 700 county leaders in the party and came up with a list of 19 fairly impressive people on a state steering committee...

...Pick-up points for the trip to Ames were arranged and information about bus and car transportation dispensed...

...72 Not even McGovern’s, show of strength in Iowa shook that perception, and only in retrospect did the press realize that something significant had been building for McGovern out in the country...

...The result was predictablea clear-cut victory for Carter, with 23 per cent of 1,094 respondents...

...Iowa, it went, was no more than a “media eventy’-the overblowing of an insignificant early phase of the delegate-selection process for the purpose of satisfying the need for hard news after all the months of vapid preliminaries...

...The Des Moines Register and Tribune had decided to poll all those who attended the dinner, and Kraft did his best to pack the hall...

...Tim Kraft, a New Mexico party organizer and state committee official whom Carter had met and recruited during the 1974 congressional campaign, was made the campaign’s Plains states coordinator, and he advanced several of the trips...

...We’d better get going...

...About 34 per cent said they were uncommitted...

...So novel was the presence of such television luminaries as Roger Mudd of CBS that State Chairman Tom Whitney peddled admission just to watch...

...So while other candidates may have been fretting about a lack of national coverage, Powell realized that the large Democratic field in 1975-76 would dilute national coverage for everyone...

...Circumstances dictated that we were going to run everywhere...

...This was one reason it was decided that headquarters could remain in Atlanta rather than being moved up to an expensive Washington office...

...Because the candidates themselves act on that perception-adjusting their campaigns to meet criticisms about perceived shortcomings-the perception becomes reality...

...Carter dealt with Kraft, as he did with most others, on an intensively personal level...

...Powell quickly seized upon the importance of local coverage in the Carter kind of campaign...

...I never remember a meeting where it was even discussed which states we were going to run in and which states we were going to skip...

...Money can’t buy the kind of press we’ll get if JC finishes first in the precinct caucuses...

...And as Carter and his wife and children pursued this retail campaigning, Kraft shrewdly studied the state caucus machinery...

...Iowa had the makings of a trap, but it was not one easily resisted, because along with the Carter invasion came, eventually, the media invasion as well, offering a prize no 1976 hopeful could resist...

...Jordan and he began scouting around for somebody who could take on the state full time, and when no one else could be found, Kraft agreed to do it himself...

...There’s usually a reporter who polls the parking lot and throws in a sentence about it...

...Whether he can maintain his early lead here when the contest switches from opinion leaders to rank-and-file voters is unclear,” he went on, but “what is evident is that Mr...

...At the Des Moines Hilton, just across from the airport, the Democratic Committee and the national press corps gathered to compile and report about 1976’s first hard vote for the presidency...

...At the dinner, Rosalynn Carter went into the balcony handing out oversized Carter buttons to people in the first rows, an easy focus for the television cameras...

...He told Jim Flansburg, a political writer for the Des Moines Register and Tribune: “We wanted someone of national prominence-and relatively inexpensive...

...It’s not your kind of state...

...In 7’heNew York Times, for example, political writer R.W...

...Minor Liberal Skirmishes So, while other candidates and prospective candidates concentrated most of their pre-election year energies on minor liberal skirmishes in the East or on New Hampshire, Carter zeroed in early on Iowa...

...At that point, the Des Moines Register became more important than The Washington Post,” he said later...

...JC has indicated very strongly that he does not want to finish second to any candidate...

...He discussed Iowa’s importance again with Jordan, who agreed but asked him to write a strong memo that Jordan could use to win support from others in Atlanta for the necessary resources...

...I felt like there was going to be an overreaction to the new rules of the Democratic Party, that people were going to pick and choose, to shape strategies that presumed a brokered convention...

...Kraft drew an early bead on this affair too...

...Iowans themselves weren’t excited about the whole business-bafely eleven per cent of the state’s Democrats eventually participated in the caucus-but the national media elevated the caucuses to a bogus extravaganza...

...Noting Carter’s flat-out promise that he would “never tell a lie,” Flansburg wrote: “If there weren’t believers, there were certainly those who were persuaded on the basis of one speech to seriously consider the candidacy of Carter...

...that was a big part of his effectiveness...

...Udall, Shriver, and Wallace were shut out...

...Carter was in bed in New York, at the apartment of Howard Samuels, a form e r Democratic gubernatorial hopeful, when Powell phoned him at about 2 a.m...

...and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.’’ (John 10: Carter’s opponents in Iowa soon found that the Good Shepherd was going to be no pushover...

...Copyright @ Jules Witcover, 1977...

...The affair had all the trappings of a political convention, with booths set up at the back of the arena for each of the hopefuls and time set aside before and after each speech for the candidates themselves to man the booths, shake hands, and answer questions...

...slap it on the chartered bus if need be...

...Payton, counting heads, told the Harris and Bayh caucuses that they each had failed to achieve 15 per cent of the total but could join another group...

...I worked in a white heat just to get a steering committee named by that time,” Kraft recalled later...

...The precinct chairman, a 30-year-old Des Moines lawyer named Pat Payton, explained the rules: the participants would form smaller caucuses of their own in various comers of the room according to candidate preference-the Carter people at one table, the Jackson people at another, the uncommitted people over in a corner, and so on...

...So Kraft alerted all the steering committee members to attend their own precinct meetings, spread the word, and vote for Carter in the straw poll...

...74 o f p o li t i c a 1 Carter’s approach also took at face value the belief, fallen into disfavor during the Nixon years, that a campaign for the presidency is and should be an educational process, not only for the voter but for the candidate himself...

...In Iowa and subsequent 1976 political battlegrounds, Jimmy Carter witnessed to voters not only about his Christian faith but about his faith in the nation and the American people...

...So said the complainers...

...He sent out three memos to all Carter workers, friends, and supporters advising them of the showcase opportunity the dinner presented and of the plans for a poll...

...We planned for that...

...The Iowans’ response to Carter’s first foray was a bit of a surprise to the candidate and his press aide...

...It was decided that it would be good publicity to conduct a straw poll on presidential preferences in conjunction with these practice caucuses...

...eight sat with the undecideds, and eight for Jackson...

...In 1972 the rise of George McGovern’s grass roots efforts at the precinct level were overloaked for a considerable time by the major newspapers and the television networks...

...We were looking for a place to go in the caucus states,” Powell said...

...Over the next eleven months Carter returned to Iowa seven times...

...Each time, he became more convinced that Iowa was a golden opportunity...

...The final votes were Carter 27.7 per cent, Bayh 13.1 per cent, Harris 9.9 per cent, Udall 5.9 per cent, Shriver 3.3 per cent, and the rest undecided or split among other candidates...

...Iowa is gifted with one of the most progressive and professional Democratic Party organizations in the country...

...Shriver was 2econd with 8.7 per cent and Bayh third with 8.1 per cent...

...Edris (Soapy) Owens, retired state president of the United Auto Workers...

...Set up a priority, then, and ration Montana, Vermont, or somewhere else...

...Bring whatever extras you have...

...The next important event did not go unnoticed...

...But little time was wasted on speculation...

...The Harris person who switched to Carter, Rick Hoenig, a 27-year-old employee of a local oil company, told me, “I really couldn’t make up my mind which one I wanted...

...I didn’t want to stay undecided...

...Like Some Foreign Mission From the beginning, in Iowa, Carter’s campaign was oriented to the individual voter...

...With Kennedy out, a lot of things would start tumbling,” Powell said...

...Indeed, seldom has a candidate without a fabled name made such a fast and favorable impression on Iowans...

...One unhappy Udall worker later stated in The Washington Post that the candidates themselves and the issues were lost in the efforts to draw press attention, and in the reporters’ determination to draw significance from an insignificant exercise...

...We felt like other candidates, particularly the ones who had duties and responsibilities in Washington, were going to have to say, ‘Well, there are 50 states...

...Was he saying he liked to be with a winner...

...Politics is theater...

...The Harris campaign, for instance, observing that its backers were among the common folk and could not afford the price of admission, made only a modest effort...

...nobody could afford to cover it so nobody would get a jump...

...It was important, however, that Democrats around the state hear about the names Carter had corralled before they attended the dry-run caucuses...

...So Carter, with 13 votes, was entitled to three of the precinct’s seven delegates...

...Several weeks before, Hamilton Jordan had phoned Democratic State Chairman Tom Whitney, and Whitney told him, according to Jordan: “You really ought to forget about Iowa...

...Shortly after midnight, with nearly 40 per cent of the precincts reporting, Carter had 34 per cent of the total...

...It was small potatoes, but the only speaking engagement Carter could wrangle...

...He campaigned with almost a haughty confidence that what the press saw as dissemblance on issues would be understood as reasonableness and common sense by voters, who themselves seldom saw things in clear black and white...

...I think,” Powell said later, “they may have asked a couple of other people first...

...Then he unceremoniously went back to bed...

...We shaped a strategy that presumed there was not going to be a brokered convention...

...Supporters once made remained supporters, because they were not simply supporters, but friends...

...Many such visits were followed by telephone calls or notes of thanks...

...Nothing was left to chance...

...He ultimately slipped to just under 28 per cent, trailing the uncommitted slate, which had about 37 per cent, but he still maintained a margin of more than two to one over his next rival, Bayh...

...If the backers of a given candidate failed to achieve that 15 per cent, they would be allowed to recaucus and join another candidate’s group...

...The fact is that the reality in the early going of a presidential campaign is not the delegatecount at all...

...He was neither discouraged by small crowds and long hours nor was early public indifference particularly bad for him...

...The only coverage you get at that stage is local...

...Muskie had acted as if he were already the party’s nominee and a great deal was expected of him...

...I know a lot more about this country than I would have if I hadn’t been to Sioux City three times, or to Florida for 25 days...

...I attended Des Moines precinct NO...

...Of these seven, one Harris person moved over to the Carter table, one joined the uncommitteds, and two threw in with the three Bayh people, just enough to qualify him at 15 per cent...

...But there were at least two notable differences: Carter had much greater determination and a stronger affinity for campaigning, and he did so in an atmosphere of low, expectations...

...And other sheep I have, which are not part of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice...

...Jackson with eight and Bayh with five to one each...

...While a crowd of costumed dancers pranced obliviously on the floor above-a crowd larger than those gathered in the basement for the important business of electing a President-Payton gave the word to start...

...She and Neil Hamilton, an Iowa State student on the steering committee, “must have put on 300 of these buttons, all in the front row,” Kraft recalled...

...Kraft, in a memo, passed the word that the two bucks “gets you everything but the chicken dinner...

...And from the very first posting it was clear that it would be Jimmy Carter’s night, the first of many...

...For his labors, Carter was declared Le Mars’ Citizen of the Day by local radio station owner Paul Olson and was given his payola: a free car wash, a movie pass, and a coupon for a free pizza...

...the uncommitted caucus of nine, to two delegates...

...The other candidates’ staffs either failed to grasp the psychological impact promised by the poll or could not get supporters out in sufficient nymbers...

...four joined a Harris caucus and three a Bayh...

...While the Iowa straw poll had sneaked up on most of the press, it did serve to alert most political reporters to the state’s importance as an eafly line on the 1976 contenders...

...There wasn’t much to pull together, but at this earliest stage it was enough...

...We didn’t need a big Washington office...

...For their romance with Muskie, the press and television paid heavy alimony after 1972 in terms of their reputation for clairvoyance, let alone clear thinking and assessment of evidence at hand...

...It is the psychological impact of the results-the perception by press, public, and contending politicians of what has happened...

...Kraft’s memo did the trick, and by Labor Day of 1975 he was living in Iowa, implementing the campaign plan...

...we’re going to focus on these 20.’ Because Jimmy was a tremendous, full-time campaigner, we could spend a little time on the states they had written off and do well there, plus also contest them for their priority states...