For presidential candidates, Iowa is no slam dunk

Iowa is ready for the onslaught of presidential candidates. But a vital question looms, less than a year from the Republican precinct caucuses here: Are the candidates ready for Iowa?

Because Iowa — in the center of the country and, for a luminous period every four years, at the center of political life — has a political character and a role in American civic life all its own.

Its mixture of humus, sand, silt and clay renders it perhaps the most fertile soil on Earth — and gives the state its reputation, in the characterization of the Library of Congress, as “a breadbasket for the U.S.” Iowa's reverence for education results in an 85.1% literacy rate — where else would the state university have a research program called the Center of the Book, designed to examine the history and culture of the printed word?

And its reputation as a testing ground for presidents was underlined when Jimmy Carter, the long shot candidate who made his breakthrough in Iowa in

1976, went into hospice care last month.

The Democrats have abandoned Iowa as the first test in the 2024 campaign; the most minority-heavy county here still is 82.7% white, and thus the state is not a reflection of the nation at large. For them, South Carolina goes first. But the Republicans are sticking with Iowa's caucuses as the first test. And if the contenders hope to perform well here, they ought to be studying up. The usual talking points won't suffice.

“There is a connection between candidates and the public that has to be very personal here, and very well-informed,” said Christopher Larimer, an Iowa native who is a political scientist at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. “You have to show what is top of mind for Iowans. You need local knowledge, a sense of the political culture. Most candidates are going to need a deep briefing, and if they don't know what they are talking about, the voters will pick up on that. And if they're scripted, they are in trouble.”

Indeed, Iowans — proud of their customary role as the winnowers of big fields of candidates, accustomed to accosting presidential prospects with difficult questions, insistent on demanding that the superficial answer isn't an answer at all — will confront the candidates with queries they will not face elsewhere.

Nowhere else, for example, will presidential candidates be questioned on their views on the future of ethanol, the cornstarch energy product that every Iowan will tell them has low costs and high octane and — a bonus! — is a domestic product. In fact — and this is a fact every presidential candidate needs to know — the state's 42 plants producing 4.5 billion gallons of ethanol annually make Iowa the country's leading source of the clean, renewable fuel.

Nowhere else will presidential candidates be required to weigh in on local issues with which they have no familiarity and for which presidents have no authority. One example is the burning question of whether farmland should be considered vulnerable to local property tax assessments that fund schools. Currently there is a bloc of farmland owners who repeatedly balk at this, endangering the financing of schools. “This is an entirely local issue,” said Barbara Trish, a Grinnell College political scientist. “But it is a classic example of a matter that has never stopped Iowans from asking presidential candidates to take a stand.”

Nowhere else will national political figures be ambushed on the details of the Farm Bill now being negotiated on Capitol Hill. Every five years, Congress must pass a new Farm Bill to set national agriculture, nutrition, conservation and forestry policy; the effort is so arcane that lawmakers traditionally leave the matter to the House and Senate Agriculture Committees. But its very esoteric nature — which tripped up Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, the very model of an urbane politico, when he suggested in 1988 that farmers here raise Belgian endive — works to the advantage of candidates from agricultural states. Prime example: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, who won the caucuses in both 1988 and 1996.

Nowhere else will presidential candidates be lured into discussing abstruse issues of eminent domain, the right of government to expropriate private property for public use.