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The crowd that gathered for Hillary Clinton in the gym of the Kirkwood Community College Recreation Center on caucus eve was, in a word, old. Crowds of bundled up elderly women dramatically sped up and slowed down as they trekked in five-degree weather from the ice covered parking lot to the gymnasium entrance. Grabbing the arm of another woman, one groped for stability as she shuffled her feet across the slippery pavement. The three hundred or so chairs around the stage provided much the same, as no one would be forced to endure standing for the hour-long stump speech.
Clinton continued to fade in the polls the week of the caucuses as she desperately worked to turn out her supporters in vote-rich eastern Iowa. Indeed, all three major Democratic campaigns held events in this second-largest city in the state on Wednesday within hours of each other.
Last week the Clinton campaign stacked new, plastic-wrapped snow shovels in storage rooms of her thirty-three field offices across the state, preparing to clear snow from the homes of elderly supporters.
Turning on the radio, it only took a minute to hear on 92.9 KAT-FM, the PAC of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, urging Clinton's appeal to women alongside "today's hits and yesterday's favorites." The elderly woman in the ad intoned that she was born before women had the right to vote, and before she died, she wanted to vote for a woman for President.
Suzann Ross, herself in her 60s, flew into Iowa from Arlington, Texas, to volunteer for Clinton in the final days before the caucus after signing up at the convention of the National Organization of Women in July. She passed out placards to Iowans as they filed into the building. "This is the top of the heat," she
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said. And though Clinton urged supporters at the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson dinner to "turn up the heat," there was little heat in the mostly muffled gym. The campaign deftly dropped dividing curtains from the ceiling to make the space smaller, though the gym was really only half-full. The press contingent may have rivaled the size of the crowd, and it showed. One man was interviewed by five different reporters in the span of fifteen minutes.
Clinton arrived and thanked a string of local officials, including State Senator Rob Hogg, which she pronounced like "hog."
"Looks like hog, sounds like hoag," a reporter next to me riffed. The chief political correspondent of Iowa's second largest newspaper frowned. The crowed broke into laughter. Indeed, the caucus gods were not treating the candidate kindly.
"Finally," she said, "our nation became the first country in the world to make it absolutely clear that every child is precious to us .... Her microphone went silent.
An aide brought her a new one, which she lifted to her mouth and began to speak again. Nothing. The aide took the mic back, and gave her another. Still nothing. She tried to continue the speech with her own hoarse voice. A new microphone sprang to life only to die less than a minute later. Voiceless again.
"I'm not easily deterred," she shouted to the crowd. "But it's hard to be heard." In Iowa, Clinton learned that lesson with more than just microphones.
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