Christmas Cheer, Campaigns an Awkward Mix For Iowa Voters

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 24, 2007

DES MOINES -- Chris Dodd, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, has been rolling across Iowa in what he calls the "Twelve Days of Results" tour. It's like the 12 Days of Christmas -- only with themes such as "Results To Protect Homeowners" replacing all that "10 Lords a-Leaping" business.

The tour ends Monday at noon in the town of Carroll, where the candidate will help box up care packages for National Guardsmen stationed overseas ("Results For a New American Community"). Then the Dodd campaign goes dark, as they say on Broadway. He'll treat staffers to ice-skating on Christmas Day, followed by hot chocolate and holiday cheer at his rented home (other candidates campaign here; he lives here). But no speeches.

"I have a pretty good ear, and it would take a tin ear to give a stump speech on Christmas Eve," Dodd says.

The presidential campaign and the holidays are tripping over one another. It's a little awkward. Many people don't want the sacred tarnished by the profane. At a subconscious level, everyone understands that red-meat politics doesn't mix with tinsel and mistletoe.

Because many states jockeyed for earlier positions on the primary-election calendar, Iowa scheduled its caucuses for a date, Jan. 3, that clings to 2008 by its fingernails -- and is just nine days after Christmas. Candidates who have feverishly campaigned throughout 2007, many of them having visited all of Iowa's 99 counties, must suddenly experiment with such novel practices as silence. For at least a couple of days here, the only decent thing a candidate can do is disappear.

Many campaigns shut down after a flurry of events on Saturday. Barack Obama, the senator from Illinois, had a final rally late Sunday afternoon in Council Bluffs. Hillary Clinton's camp scheduled a party Sunday night for staffers, volunteers and hopelessly trapped-in-Iowa journalists. Most candidates will go into campaign mode again sometime on Wednesday.

In recent days, campaign buses have journeyed from one twinkling, reindeer-guarded event to another. Teenagers in Waterloo attended a Mike Huckabee event wearing shirts saying "Merry Christmas and a Huckabee New Year." Mitt Romney drew well over 1,000 people to a West Des Moines holiday party at which the post-speech music was not the standard campaign-trail, get-yourself-to-the-polls pop tune, but rather "Silent Night."

Jackie Dodd, the senator's wife, told supporters Thursday night at a holiday party, "I think this is the cruelest trick that's ever been played on Iowa, to make it so you have to focus on the caucuses at the same time you are focusing on the holidays."

Some residents see no conflict.

"It's an interesting time frame to couple them together. Prayer and action. 'Faith without works is dead.' That's what the Word says," said Sara DeMeulenaere of Des Moines, who describes herself as a "messianic believer."

Pastor Bill Devlin, who is touring Iowa for a nonpartisan group called Redeem the Vote, said: "I think it's perfectly appropriate to talk about politics around the Christmas table. I think this is something Jesus would want us to do."

Any discussion of the Christmas/caucus overlap must acknowledge one underappreciated fact: Many Iowans don't caucus. Reporters typically interview people who are attending political events. Wander a couple of blocks away and you'll find all manner of citizens who will be at home on the night of Jan. 3, watching the Orange Bowl.

For those who do caucus, the Christmasization of the campaign threatens, in turn, to politicize Christmas. Take Marcie Hagge, a teacher in Cedar Falls, who says she'll host the usual family bash with the traditional dinner of chili and oyster stew (which she assures us are two entirely separate pots of food). She has family members arriving at her home not only from all points of the compass but also from all wavelengths of the political spectrum.

"It's a new phenomenon," she says of the Christmas/caucus overlap. She'll keep things civil, even if her brother, Ron, the Republican, says something she disagrees with. In Iowa this year, she says, "A lot of decisions are going to be made around the Christmas table."

But not at Judy Estabrook's house. Estabrook, another Democrat, will also have a big family get-together at her home in Waterloo, but she'll have a strict no-politics rule. "I have a son that gets belligerent. He's a hard-core Republican."

There's a general assumption that attack ads don't work well in Iowa in general, and that may be doubly true in this season of peace on Earth and good will toward men. The rules are likely to change at about 12:01 a.m. Dec. 26.

For now, many candidates have adapted to the calendar by Christmasizing their ads on TV and the Web, with varying degrees of solemnity and campiness.

In the campy category would be Rudy Giuliani's ad, in which he wears what one assumes is a borrowed bright-red sweater vest, and vows to give everyone not only a safer America and lower taxes but also "a really nice fruitcake with a big red bow on it."

Fred Thompson's holiday ad has no narration at all, just still images of U.S. soldiers serving abroad as a piano renders a poignant "We Wish You a Merry Christmas."

Sen. John McCain's ad recounts how a compassionate North Vietnamese prison guard approached him and, without saying a word, drew a cross in the sand one Christmas while he was a prisoner of war.

Barack Obama's warm and fuzzy ad features his wife and adorable kids, a Christmas tree, a fire in the hearth (looks like gas and not real wood) and the candidate's central campaign theme that "the things that unite us as a people are more powerful and enduring than anything that sets us apart."

Clinton's ad shows her with Christmas presents, onto which she is slipping envelopes labeled "Universal Health Care" and "Alternative Energy" and so forth. "Where could I put 'Universal Pre-K'?" she asks, before discovering precisely the right package.

But no Christmas ad has generated as much interest and controversy as the one from Huckabee, a kind of visual Hallmark card in which the candidate talks directly to the camera about celebrating "the birth of Christ." The spot incited much Internet buzz about whether it contains a subliminal image of a cross in the background.

Huckabee counterattacked, saying at a speech in West Des Moines that the controversy "has revealed to us just how far we've slipped in our culture." He also joked that if you play the commercial backward, it says "Paul is dead" (a reference to the '60s-era rumor that Beatles lyrics and album images had coded messages about the death of Paul McCartney).

What has resonated with many Iowans is that in the ad Huckabee doesn't say the all-purposed secular greeting "Happy Holidays" but rather uses the words "Christ," "God" and, most important, "Merry Christmas."

Mike Waggoner, a professor at the University of Northern Iowa who edits a journal on religion and education, says of Iowans, "I know they find it refreshing for someone to say, 'Doggone it, Merry Christmas.' "