Obama puts rural Illinois experience to work in Iowa

Christopher Wills

OQUAWKA, Ill. — Barack Obama is working hard to persuade rural voters in Iowa farm country they should support a big-city black lawyer with a strange name.

He has done it before — three years ago, in neighboring Illinois, when he was running for the Senate.

Here in little Henderson County, just across the Mississippi from Iowa, only 30 people voted for him in the Democratic primary in 2004. The overwhelmingly white, blue-collar voters knew almost nothing about Obama.

“They didn’t even think of him,” recalls the county Democratic chairman, Richard Bigger.

They were thinking of him by the time of the general election, after Obama’s spotlight speech at the Democratic National Convention and after he made a point of aggressively courting voters outside the Chicago area.

He ended up getting 2,700 votes in the county, more than twice as many as his Republican opponent, commentator Alan Keyes.

Obama’s presidential campaign cannot count on a repeat of the circumstances in 2004, when he faced a weak GOP opponent after the original Senate nominee dropped out.

But he can bring to Iowa some of the hard work, strategy and charisma that helped him in Illinois.

In the White House race, Obama is counting heavily on January’s caucuses in Iowa. The Illinois senator is in a close race in the state with New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.

Obama has 31 field offices in Iowa, 10 more than Clinton. He is building relationships with community leaders who can influence voters, a strategy that helped him in Illinois. He also is bringing Illinois supporters — including Henderson County’s Bigger — to sing his praises.

His campaign is stealing a page from Edwards’ presidential run in 2004, trying to get Obama to as many rural communities as possible before Clinton shows up.

On a recent day, Obama spoke to hundreds of people in a park in the northern Iowa city of New Hampton, where a golden cornfield ready for harvest served as a backdrop.

The candidate commented on the fine Iowa scenery as storm clouds hovered overhead and a cool breeze swept through. He told his listeners, seated on folding chairs, that many in the U.S. feel “the system isn’t working for us.”

Last Friday, in Indianola at the county fairgrounds, he used humor to soften the charge that he is too inexperienced.

“Sometimes I think it’s because I look young,” Obama said. “I got these big ears. I look like Opie.”

His Chicago staff may need occasional help understanding Iowa — a newspaper article about hog waste hangs in the office with “Hogs matter to Iowans!” scrawled across it. But communications director Robert Gibbs insists Obama gets it without such reminders.

The pain caused when a factory shuts down is the same in Newton, Iowa, as it is in Galesburg, Ill., Gibbs said. Iowans face the same problems with agriculture and education as do people in Illinois.

The veterans he meets are not that different from Obama’s grandfather, who grew up in Kansas and served in World War II.

Stefan Schmidt, a political science professor at Iowa State University, said Obama’s Senate campaign probably was good preparation for Iowa.

“That border along the Mississippi River is a little bit artificial,” he said. “Small towns, rural, with some of the same problems, except maybe Iowa is a little more liberal, which would help him.”

As a state senator from Chicago, Obama showed up at political events throughout Illinois in 2002 when he began setting his sights on Capitol Hill.

“They were like, ‘How do you spell his name? Where is this guy from?’” recalls lawyer and Democratic activist John Clemons, who helped introduce Obama to leaders in southern Illinois. They usually walked away impressed and would then spread the word to others.

Obama also got help from a television commercial filmed by Sheila Simon, daughter of the late Sen. Paul Simon, a popular figure in southern Illinois despite his liberal views.

“Down here, people are often suspicious about people from Chicago,” she said. “That hurdle had to be gotten over.”
Matt Hynes, who managed a rival campaign in the Senate primary, recalls that as Election Day approached, tracking polls showed Obama going “up and up and up. It was amazing.”

“When I look at the polls in Iowa, I think, ‘Just wait and see,’” Hynes said.

In Illinois three years ago, Obama captured 27 percent of the downstate vote in a seven-way primary. That, and his support in the Chicago area, gave him an overwhelming victory.

In the general election, Obama expected a tough opponent and was determined to shore up his support in rural areas, such as Henderson County, where he had not made an impact yet.

He arranged high-profile tours that took him from near the Wisconsin border to the southern tip of Illinois, far closer to Memphis, Tenn., than to Chicago.

Obama talked about jobs, education and other standard issues. He joked about his name and the sudden fame his convention speech had brought.

One of those tours took him to Cairo, a river town in deep southern Illinois with a long history of racial tension and violence.

Obama likes to tell the story of that visit when he wants to emphasize his ability to bring people together. He recalls how nervous he was about the reception the town would give an unfamiliar black lawmaker from Chicago. He was greeted by a smiling crowd of blacks and whites, all wearing his blue campaign buttons.

In the November election, he won 92 of Illinois’ 102 counties as he earned 70 percent of the vote against Keyes. He got 61 percent of the downstate vote.

Still, some people question whether downstate Illinoisans have truly embraced Obama.

Lyn Zeilstra, editor of the weekly Oquawka Current, says the community remains a bit suspicious of Obama — of his middle name, Hussein, and his religion. Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ, considered the most liberal of the mainline Protestant groups.

Bigger sees the 2004 landslide as evidence that local voters — ones much like the Iowans who will help choose a nominee in January — embraced Obama despite all their differences.

“They voted for the man,” he says.

(Associated Press)