I don’t remember the precise words and I can’t duplicate his eloquence but the gist was not hard to follow: I don’t understand you folks out here, he said, waving his hand as if to cover Iowa and South Dakota and all adjacent territories. But I’m going to talk to you anyway.

Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats have given you everything and made you a real middle class. We gave you price supports to protect your revenues. We gave you the REA to give you electricity on your farms. We gave you greenbelts to protect the soil on your farmland. We brought you fair trade to protect your small businesses. We gave you social security to protect your old age. And he rattled off the many things that the Roosevelt’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal had brought to the farmers and the communities that depended on them.
And then he paused and said, the Democrats and I are going to continue to give you those things. And the Republicans are trying to take them away from you. And yet you’re going to vote against me and the Democrats.

Why? Why do you vote against your own economic interests? Stevenson asked rhetorically. I don’t pretend to understand it. And then he launched into a marvelous speech, articulate, witty, and full of lofty ideas, that made Dave and I almost instant Democrats and emerging Stevensonian liberals.

Well, Iowa has come a long way since then and it has been a delight and inspiration for us expatriate Iowans (I don’t believe in ex-Iowans) to watch the world’s spotlight shine on our home towns and on our good people trudging through the snow and cold to see the presidential candidates first hand and to then today cast one of the most important votes in U.S. history. It was also heartening to see the field of Democratic candidates getting good crowds and good reception from the Iowans and that the second tier of candidates all got better reception than any of the Republican candidates. This is truly democracy in action, Jefferson style and Franklin style,
in a state with the most small places of any comparable region in the world.

Several candidates even got to my small place of Rock Rapids (population 2,800 or so), just five miles from the Minnesota line to the north and l3 miles to the South Dakota line to the west. My local citizen reporter, Jim Wells, emailed me that McCain, Giuliani, and Mitt and Ann Romney all made it to town. And he saw Huckabee in nearby Alton. He found McCain the most impressive.

I asked members of my high school graduating class on our email tree if Iowa would pick the next president.
Their replies had the ring of being up close and personal.
(There were only 32 of us in our class, neatly divided into l6 boys and l6 girls, too many of whom have died.)
Dick Flannery said he would be at a Sioux City caucus and would vote for Clinton. He was not sure that Iowa would pick the next president, but he predicted that only Clinton and Obama would still be in the running.

Jeanette Zornig Stadfield, who now lives in Sioux Falls, said that “if Iowa picks Hillary, I’ll disown my birth state. Bill goes with the package! Good grief! What if she won and picked Bill as her running mate? Is that possible?”
She said it was a tossup for her between Edwards and Obama. “Edwards would be a good representative for our country, seems he’s a little better speaker than Obama. I guess I’ll pick Edwards, even though I seem to like Obama’s personality just a bit better. In fact, since I started writing this paragraph, I’ve switched from Obama to Edwards.”

And Dave Dietz? Well, he became a high school principal in Long Island, New York, the sort of principal who liked the movie “Ferris Buehler Takes a Day Off.” He is now retired with his wife Flo, a college sweetheart from Iowa State, in a little town near Hot Springs, Arkansas. He’s still a Democrat and a liberal. And he loves to see that Iowans are poised to go Democratic and populist (he says confidently that Obama and Huckabee will win.)

The Guardian staff voted for Edwards today in our straw poll, with Obama and Clinton in a virtual tie for second. Ron Paul won the Republican nod. As for me, I would vote Edwards, and I hope that it will be he who carries the mantle of Adlai Stevenson out of the Midwest and that Iowans will not only have voted their economic interests in the best sense but that they have indeed picked the next president.
In any event, I am very proud to say that I am an Iowan. B3