The Scribe Who Gets The Candidates' Vote
All Eyes on Blogging Iowa Newsman

By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 18, 2007

DES MOINES -- Back in May, when speculation burbled up that Hillary Clinton might bypass Iowa, David Yepsen dashed off a blog entry comparing the New York senator's campaign to previous clunkers, including the early days of Reagan 1980, Gore 2000 and Kerry 2004. "Just as those candidates realized their campaigns were top heavy and sluggish -- and that they personally needed to reach down inside themselves to be sharper and better candidates -- so, too, does Senator Clinton now," wrote Yepsen, the Des Moines Register's veteran political columnist.

A little while later, the phone rang. "Senator, why are you calling me?" he asked, startled to hear Clinton's voice. "Well, I read your blog," she replied, and she wanted more details about what he thought was wrong with her campaign. Several days ago, with her status in the Hawkeye State looking wobbly as the Jan. 3 caucuses loom, Clinton had dinner with Yepsen, huddling in a private room at a restaurant here with her Iowa campaign director, Teresa Vilmain.

The three gossiped about Iowa politics and the state of the race.

At 57, having covered every campaign here since 1976, Yepsen is the old-journalism king of the Iowa caucuses. He is also the new-journalism king of the Iowa caucuses. Heck, if the Iowa caucuses had their own currency, the bills just might have David Yepsen's face on them.

With his matter-of-fact newspaper assessments of candidates and their campaigns and his popular Register blog, launched for the 2008 cycle, he makes 'em and he breaks 'em. A positive Yepsen column is tantamount to an A-list endorsement, generating its own cycle of campaign press releases and news coverage. And if Yepsen goes negative, it can force a campaign to make changes real quick.

Consider his glowing online review of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's Nov. 10 Jefferson-Jackson Day address. Posted early the next morning, Yepsen declared, "Obama's superb speech . . . could catapult his bid." The piece got so many hits that one of the Register's servers crashed. It was picked up by Internet news sites, from ABC to the Chicago Tribune, cited as validation of Obama's sensational performance.

Three weeks later, Yepsen posted his toughest entry this year, lecturing Obama for informing out-of-state Iowa college students in a piece of campaign literature that they are eligible to participate in the caucuses, now just over two weeks away. "These are the Iowa caucuses," Yepsen wrote on Nov. 30. "Asking people who are 'not from Iowa' to participate in them changes the nature of the event."

Not many out-of-state students will be around on Jan. 3, and even if they are, it is 100 percent legal for them to participate. But the offending Obama flier has since dropped out of circulation. It may have been above board, but to Yepsen the effort just wasn't kosher.

"It jumped out at me as something that would offend Iowans," he explained in an interview. It pierces a purity about the caucuses that Yepsen strives to protect -- a purity that, should it be lost, could cost Iowa its coveted first-in-the-nation slot, and Yepsen his professional franchise.

Iowa caucusgoers are a uniquely American political subculture, a collection of civic-minded individuals in both parties who are willing to take the time to attend candidate rallies, endure endless robo-calls, and generally tune in to the presidential horse race a year before anyone else in the country. They are older; they watch news instead of game shows. They are the kind of people who attend city council meetings -- and two days after New Year's, they may be selecting your next president.

Burly and vaguely academic-looking, with a shock of wavy graying hair, Yepsen is the journalistic embodiment of the Iowa caucuses. He wears a brass belt that reads "Newsman." And somehow he has never grown cynical.

He expects the best from politicians and believes everyone, even the long shots, deserves to be heard. There aren't too many reporters who get personal phone calls from Hillary Clinton. Yepsen waves those off and wonders why he can't get an interview with Bill.

The 2008 cycle is "the most exciting ever. It's bigger, more wide open in both parties, and less clear in either party who's going to win. It's just huge. It's really a high-stakes proposition," Yepsen said over ham and pancakes at the Drake Diner, a local political haunt.

He pauses to greet a local union official in a John Edwards T-shirt. "I mean, it's a lot of fun, it's a great ego trip," Yepsen continued. "I get to see and do a lot of things. I tell people I've got great seats, and I really do. But at the same time, it's sobering, because we are talking about the American presidency. And it sounds corny, but I think it's a pretty serious deal, and I think a lot of people in Iowa do, too."

He acknowledges the turmoil of today's news business, the push for reporters to become bloggers and videographers, in addition to churning out daily copy. He fits in television appearances and quick hits for the Register online. But when Yepsen shows up to cover a Democratic agriculture forum, he stays for every candidate speech -- and hears hours of tedious pandering.

In his white Subaru, with the classical music cranked up, he darts from one event to the next, just as he has for 30 years. He listens to the stump speech, he takes notes. His wife, Mary Stuart, a physician, knows she won't see much of him, even though her office is across the street from his. Their daughter, Elizabeth, now lives in San Francisco, where she works for Google.

When Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut conducted Iowa due diligence before launching his bid for the Democratic nomination, he debriefed former GOP senator Robert Dole, who won the state twice, in 1988 and 1996. Of all local political reporters, Yepsen is "about the best in the country," Dole said.

"You're going to like this guy. He's balanced, fair. He'll give you more than an even shake."

In October, Yepsen singled out Dodd for offering a rapid Iraq withdrawal timetable that seemed in sync with the strong antiwar sentiments of Iowa Democrats. He has written generously about Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, two other well-seasoned Democratic long shots, along with former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, well before the Republican candidate surged in the polls.

Yepsen joined the Register in 1974, two years after the Iowa Democratic Party moved its caucus to first place on the nominating calendar. A cub reporter from tiny Jefferson, Iowa, he was a lifelong political buff who was elected student body president in high school, governor of the Iowa American Legion's Boys State program at age 17, and a member of the student senate at the University of Iowa. His first big assignment was former president Jimmy Carter's campaign. He recalls being the only reporter to show up at the former Georgia governor's press conferences.

"People were dismissing him early on," Yepsen said. "But you just don't do that."

Carter led the Democratic field on caucus day, an outcome that Yepsen keeps in mind with every new cycle. Another lesson of 1976: Technically, the Democratic winner that year was "undecided," underscoring the fickle nature of the Iowa electorate -- even as late as caucus night.

When Dodd threw a house-warming party shortly after he and his family moved to Des Moines, Yepsen showed up with a bottle of Templeton Rye, an Iowa staple and supposedly Al Capone's favorite brand. "I told him I'm saving it for caucus night, either to celebrate with him or to drown my sorrows," Dodd said with a laugh.

Biden met Yepsen during his first presidential campaign in 1987, when the two spent long stretches together. One late night in some remote Iowa town, they borrowed a Trans Am from a hotel desk clerk to drive to a pizza parlor. Biden drove. But just as the brash young senator's campaign was catching fire, Yepsen received a copy of the infamous plagiarism tape, provided secretly by Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis's campaign. Yepsen initially dismissed it as a hit job, and put off writing about it. Then a splashy story in the New York Times, the other recipient of the tape, forced him to respond.

Even though the coverage led to Biden's unraveling, there are no hard feelings. "I really respect him," Biden said of Yepsen. "He covered me a lot, he spent a lot of time with me. There are no cheap shots. He has a perspective that few people have, and he's been a lot more right than wrong."

Yepsen has his detractors, and he is fooled now and then. He misread former Vermont governor Howard Dean's campaign in 2004: "If organization is as important as caucus lore tells us it is, Howard Dean should win the Iowa caucuses tonight," read the opening line of Yepsen's Register column on Jan. 19, 2004.

His complaint about out-of-state students struck some observers as caucus jingoism. "David Yepsen owes all Iowans an apology," wrote liberal blogger Patrick Stansberry, who noted that the state is suffering a brain drain. "These students are the ones Iowa is depending on to stay in the state after they graduate," he noted on his Century of the Common Iowan blog.

But Yepsen shrugged off the complaints. "I do worry about the integrity of the process," he said. "And I think that's part of our job, the watchdog function of the media." In the old days, it was technically legal to falsify caucus results, Yepsen noted. But he ranted about that, too, and now it's a misdemeanor.

"Every four years Iowa has to fight a battle to stay first," Yepsen continued. "One thing the state has going for it is there's a sense the politics here is honest, clean. It's not Chicago or Louisiana. At least the candidates are entitled to a fair fight."