While many will debate about the wisdom of starting the presidential nominating process in Iowa, this diary will bypass that issue to look at the actual process in one medium sized Iowa county. This will be about the nuts and bolts process the campaigns engage in to win caucus support. Caucus support translates into delegate strength through the long process to the Nationl Convention. The website of the Iowa Democratic Party used to have a link to the entire arcane process, but no more. In the run-up to the caucuses, the campaigns usually send a staffer to one or more county central committee meetings in the year before the election. At last night's meeting, our central our county central committee had its first official presentation from a presidential campaign. It must be noted that all nine official campaigns and exploratory committees were contacted. The Vilsack campaign sent a staffer last night, while the others did not. We did not get a hard sell, a stump speech, or any favorite son appeal.
What we did get were some biographical information of the staffer. Interesting personal touches like: she is from Gov. Vilsack's adopted home town of Mt. Pleasant. Christie Vilsack was her 8th grade English teacher. These little human connection stories that have little to do with any reason any of us might or might not want him to be president do seem to have a certain appeal at the emotional level. You know, the she's such a nice young woman, I sure want her candidate to win networking appeal.
As for the early buzz in this small group, I detected no clear favorite. Vilsack, Edwards, Clinton and Obama seemed to be known by most of the people there, while the others will have to work more on name recognition. As a result, the group requested that I put together a list of links to the web sites of the active presidential candidates and email those to our county mailing list. Mission Accomplished.
The invitations will go out for our next meeting and other campaigns may also show up (I expect they will). I expect they will be recruiting supporters to be precinct captains, county points of contact, etc. very soon.
Originally posted at Daily Kos on January 30, 2007
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1 comment:
Thanks for this--Polk County is so huge, and I'm looking forward to learning more about how things work in Jones County.
Do you get the sense that endorsements by people on the county central committee are very important in terms of building an organization, precinct captains, etc.?
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