DES MOINES, Ia. -- The corn in the fields that blanket much of this agricultural state's one-time plains may be high and tufted, but the would-be presidents at Sunday's Democratic Presidential Candidate Debate at Drake University understood that it's not yet harvest season. Under aggressive questioning by debate moderator George Stephanopoulous of ABC News, the candidates refused to take strong stands against each other, preferring to water arguments they'd already sown and keep their disputes quietly growing. This rendered the early morning debate a largely sedate affair. The candidates hewed to the lines of attack laid down during the more prominent Yearly Kos and AFL-CIO debates earlier this month, but by and large did not lay out new ones.
John Edwards continued to pursue his attack on Hillary Clinton for taking money from Washington lobbyists and once again sought to contrast his message of change with her years in Washington; Barack Obama continued his efforts to make the campaign about his judgment, rather than Clinton's experience; Joe Biden continued to be the voice of foreign policy realism; Dennis Kucinich continued his movement into the role of liberal with a sense of humor; Mike Gravel continued his angry outbursts; Bill Richardson continued to advocate his "one-point plan" on Iraq; Chris Dodd continued to be regrettably forgettable; and Clinton continued to float above it all.
Offered the opportunity to go for the jugular in the debate's opening moments, when Stephanopoulous questioned them about Obama's experience and Clinton's high negative ratings, the whole field recoiled from ratcheting up the intensity of their attacks. With five months still to go before the Iowa caucuses, perhaps they sensed that pulling back from the brink was the only way to keep the race from descending into a slugfest at the very moment Iowa voters are starting to tune in. Candidates are still running biography ads in the Hawkeye State at this point, after all, and interviews with dozens of potential caucuses-goers at events across the state revealed the vast majority of them had never before seen the candidates in person. There will be plenty of time to harvest the fruit of damaging critiques later.
In the meantime, the candidates are not shying away from targeting their hits in locally tangible ways. Barack Obama may have shied away from John Edwards' invitation last week to join him in efforts to pressure all Democratic presidential candidates to refuse lobbyist money. He was less pointed on the issue than Edwards during the Sunday debate, but Obama has his reasons. For one, he's already vigorously pursuing the issue at the grassroots level in Iowa. Since Clinton's odd defense of lobbyists as representatives of regular Americans at the Yearly Kos presidential forum earlier this month, Obama's campaign has drawn attention to the role of lobbyists and his refusal to take PAC or federal lobbyist money, bringing it up in communities that don't necessarily follow debates in the big national papers or blogs.
"We had 29 press conferences in a week [on it] in every office in the state," Obama's Iowa press secretary Tommy Vietor explained after the debate. "Everyone hung up a sign in the office that said 'Not paid for by PAC or special interest money' to highlight his record of fighting special interests and lobbyists."
In Fort Madison, population 11,300, the anti-PAC sign was visible from the road that wound past the local Obama office, through the plate glass windows covered with the hand-painted "Obama 08" signs that are the candidate's Iowa hallmark. The campaign has no plans to take the signs down before the caucuses.
"Public polling shows it's one of the most potent issues in Iowa," Vietor added.
John Edwards, too, has added the issue to his stump speech, and railed against the lobbyists to great applause over the past week during his "Fighting for One America" tour of the state. Although Sunday's debate provided the opportunity to score some points on Iowa television, Edwards had little need for that when he's been doing so well in face-to-face chats with voters in tidy, 2,600-person towns like Bloomfield -- where signs warn drivers to watch for horse-drawn vehicles, still used by the local Amish -- and the declining industrial towns of the Mississippi River valley.
"We never did any polling on it," Edwards campaign manager David Bonior said of the anti-lobbyist line after the debate. From the sound of the applause that greeted Edwards's critique of PAC money in speech after speech across the state, he didn't have to.
