Justin Webb's America

Minus a thousand

• Justin Webb
• 17 Dec 07, 04:54 AM GMT

Iowa - where I have just arrived - is a reminder of the clash in US politics between the homespun and the horribly over-sophisticated.

Our plane waits for half an hour on the tarmac because Des Moines airport is, in spite of being a glamorous destination every four years, pretty low key. So when two aircraft arrive at the same time there is a delay while enough ground staff are found to cope.

And yet the entire political nation and half the political world is arriving or about to arrive - my flight alone contained a man from the Daily Telegraph, another from Fox and the admirable Howard Kurtz from the Washington Post and CNN. At the hotel serious looking people are holding suit carriers full of TV anchor clothes to be stuck on top-halves at the last minute in order to stay warm.

A friend tells me the weather - it's minus a thousand, there is a freezing fog, and everything is covered in snow as hard as steel - is particularly bad at the moment but I suspect the locals have arranged it.

They love their caucuses, do not get me wrong, but it seems they like the old-fashioned variety not the hard-driven modern type where campaigns arrange "robo-calls" to drum up support, forcing many people here simply to refuse to answer their phones till 4th January.

A telephone pollster tells me his company noticed that Iowa had a reported death rate 20 times the national average: apparently when they called and asked for a husband or wife the spouse would say, "Oh they died!" in the hope of getting off the lists …...

• Permalink
• Comments