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Ever since the YearlyKos forum where Hillary Clinton defended taking money from D.C. lobbyists, OpenLeft.com and many other blogs have been full of commentary about that statement. Where the statement could hurt her the most is in my old home state of Iowa.
Iowans, especially Iowa Democrats, tend to be natural-born populists. Iowa's Democratic Senator Tom Harkin is a quintessential populist hell-raiser. Their two new congressmen and new governor are all oriented toward a populist message and policies. Iowa's caucus history is full of outsiders, reformers, and populists doing surprisingly well:
-In 1972, the first time the Iowa caucuses played a role, George McGovern's Midwestern populism helped him do surprisingly well in Iowa.
-In 1976, outside reformer Jimmy Carter beat a bunch of better-known, better funded D.C. establishment Democrats to score a shocking victory.
-In 1984, Mondale- even though he was clearly an insider- ran a classic labor-oriented Midwestern populist-style campaign to win Iowa, and Gary Hart ran an outsider, reform-the-system race to surge to a surprising second.
-In 1988, Gephardt won by running a strongly populist anti-free trade campaign to win, and a fellow Midwesterner with an outsider, clean-up-government message, Paul Simon came in a close second. (Distinctly non-populist technocrat Mike Dukakis finished 3rd, but then won New Hampshire and used his money edge to sweep the table everywhere else.)
-In 2004, Edwards' small-town, son-of-a-millworker, two Americas message allowed him to surge dramatically at the end of the race, and come within an eyelash of beating Kerry for first.
Obviously, the pattern doesn't hold 100% of the time- Dean was a hell of a lot more of an outsider than Kerry, for example- but there is certainly a strong tendency toward outsider, reformer and hell-raiser candidates in Iowa.
I've already written, and told my friends inside Hillary's campaign, that I think the lobbyist answer is a big problem for Clinton in general but especially in Iowa. I don't think that substantively there is any difference between a registered D.C. lobbyist for a corporation giving and raising money for you than the CEO or a major shareholder of the same company doing so for you, so I think the distinction that Edwards and Obama raise is more than a little phony. But I think politically, Clinton has put herself in a corner here and needs to be very clear that she is not defending the status quo and the establishment.
The thing is, the Hillary Clinton I know from my White House days has a strong populist streak in her. I'll never forget how pissed she was the morning the Harry and Louise ads started running, how her first instinct was to go and hammer the insurance companies for doing it, or how much she advocated for policies in internal debates that would help working-class folks.
For her sake, I hope she gets back to that sense of populist outrage. She has some advisers around her, such as Mark Penn, who recoil at anything the least bit populist or anti-establishment in nature because they are so happily entrenched in the D.C. establishment. But I don't believe she can win in Iowa without making it clear that she is more on the side of the regular folks than she is of the big dogs in D.C. And as front-loaded as the calendar is, if she loses in Iowa, the road to the nomination becomes very challenging.
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