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| THE FIRST TEST? | |
 August 13, 1999 
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Margaret Warner looks at preparations for the Iowa straw poll. Will the poll's results make or break Republican candidates?
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MARGARET WARNER: Even the animals in Iowa are getting face time with presidential candidates this summer. PATRICK BUCHANAN: Will you be coming down to Ames for the straw poll? You don't think so? MARGARET WARNER: In recent months, the Republican hopefuls have shaken thousands of hands -- LAMAR ALEXANDER: How are you, sir? MAN: Well, I'm fine. LAMAR ALEXANDER: Great to see you.
DAN QUAYLE: You don't have to go and listen to the speeches. Just go in and vote. (laughter) MARGARET WARNER: The only thing Republicans are asked to do in return is cast a ballot for the candidate who paid for them. |
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| A political circus? | |||||||||||
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MIKE MURPHY: The Iowa straw poll is the best circus in politics this year. MARGARET WARNER: Washington GOP Strategist Mike Murphy worked the Ames straw poll four years ago for Lamar Alexander.
MARGARET WARNER: Nine of the 10 Republican hopefuls have been hooked. They're spending serious time and money to compete in what's become a three-tiered contest in Ames. SPOKESMAN: The governor of Texas, the next President of the United States, George W. Bush.
SEN. JOHN McCAIN: I just find all straw polls sort of an affront to average citizens. To ask someone to pay 25 bucks -- to pay for someone to vote for me, to me is ludicrous. |
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| The effects of the straw poll. | |||||||||||
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MICHAEL GARTNER: The straw poll is not legitimate at all. It's phony. MARGARET WARNER: Former NBC News President Michael Gartner is editor of the Ames Tribune. He's run columns criticizing the straw poll. MICHAEL GARTNER: This is no way to select people at all. There really have been very little discussions about issues during this whole thing. It's parades and pigs, it's not -- it's not substance or issues, it's not debates, it's all entertainment. MARGARET WARNER: David Yepsen, chief political writer for the Des Moines Register, concedes the winner of the Ames straw poll has never won the Republican nomination. But he insists it does have merit. DAVID YEPSEN: It measures the strength of your organization. It says something about the message; do you have a message that motivates people? I don't think it's phony. I mean, I think it's real because the politicians have made it real. MARGARET WARNER: They certainly have.
PATRICK BUCHANAN: The straw poll of 1999 is the most important political event of 1999. It may be as important as a major early primary in the year 2000, if not more important. MARGARET WARNER: The straw poll's importance this time is a symptom of how the Republican nominating process has changed. MIKE MURPHY: George W. Bush has done such a terrific job of winning the invisible primary -- the money, the endorsements, all the stuff that goes on early before the voters show up to participate -- that all the other candidates are desperate to do something to show that they have a rationale for their candidacy. The curse of this is that they need the perception of a victory to keep going and raise the money to pay for the real campaign. |
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| Winnowing a crowded field | |||||||||||
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DAVID YEPSEN: The function of Iowa in this process has almost always been to winnow the field of candidates, to take a field of ten or twelve candidates and cut it down to three or four. That's why I've always said there are three tickets coming out of Iowa -- first class, coach, and standby. MARGARET WARNER: But that's the caucuses. DAVID YEPSEN: I think it's true for the straw poll too. ELIZABETH DOLE: With your help and God willing, we're going to make history and we're going to have a lot of fun along the way. Okay? Thanks very much. GROUP CHANTING: Bauer Power. Bauer Power. MARGARET WARNER: If money -- or the lack of it -- is driving the candidates to compete in Ames, it may also be shaping the outcome. LAMAR ALEXANDER: Do you only do residential --
ELIZABETH DOLE: Take care. MARGARET WARNER: They've visited Iowa dozens of times -- moving about as frugally as possible -- DAN QUAYLE: What kind of a description would you use? MARGARET WARNER: -- and listening to Iowans talk about the issues they care about. |
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| Listening to the issues | |||||||||||
| DAN QUAYLE: Do you find a lot of these hog producers that
you've been buying from for years are just getting out of the hog business?
SPOKESMAN: One out of every two. DAN QUAYLE: Fifty percent in this area are getting out? SPOKESMAN: Now, ladies and gentlemen, let's welcome Steve Forbes.
DAVID YEPSEN: They buy two bus caravans, they buy satellite telephones, they buy digital cameras to take pictures of voters with their candidates; they can hire telephone banks, they can dump tons of direct mail in this state. They can pull out all of the stops and they are. Other candidates can't afford that. MARGARET WARNER: Yepsen estimates that Bush and Forbes are spending up to $2 million each on the straw poll -- nearly double what the others are allowed to spend on Ames and next year's Iowa's caucuses combined. Forbes has spent months campaigning here, laying out his views in detail. STEVE FORBES: If you want to make yourself unhappy, just sit down and
add up all the MARGARET WARNER: But Bush -- unlike all the others -- has made just four visits to the state, one of them for a fund-raiser. He's attracted big crowds, but hasn't offered much in the way of specifics. GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: It's conservative to be confront illegitimacy, it's compassionate to offer practical help to women and children in crisis. MARGARET WARNER: And most of his encounters with voters have been of the meet-and-greet variety. OLDER WOMAN GREETING BUSH: I met your farther a couple of years ago. He gave me a kiss right here DAN QUAYLE: When he comes in and meets with hundreds of people, he leaves very quickly. I'm here all week. This is the way you do it. It's called retail politics. |
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| Campaigning after Iowa straw poll | |||||||||||
| MARGARET WARNER: Bush, however, makes no apologies for his
style.
MARGARET WARNER: The Texas governor's money advantage rankles the other candidates. Some try humor. ELIZABETH DOLE: I think George Bush better stop raising all this money, or people aren't going to have anything left to buy their Christmas presents, you know (laughs). GARY BAUER: Some of you know our front-runner had a real great list of names he called that his father gave him. And he was able to raise millions of dollars from those names. I thought, you know, gee, it worked for him, so I started calling my dad's list. And after a couple of days I was $1500 in the hole because he hadn't paid all of his debts before he passed on. So I guess that's not going to work for me.
MARGARET WARNER: But there's some serious criticism too. STEVE FORBES: I think money without a message equals mush, equals zero. PATRICK BUCHANAN: Is it skewing the process? Of course it is. You know, we've always said that the Republican nomination can't be bought and the presidency can't be bought. But I'll tell you this -- we're going to find out. AD SPOKESMAN: This just in: The Iowa caucuses have been canceled. An auction is underway on the White House lawn. MARGARET WARNER: Alexander's trying to generate a backlash against Bush -- spending a good chunk of his dwindling funds to air this ad. ALEXANDER AD SPOKESMAN: Sold for 50 million dollars. LAMAR ALEXANDER: (ad) I've been all over Iowa because the presidency is too important to be bought or inherited. It ought to be earned. MARGARET WARNER: For all these candidates, who've spent so much time and money in hopes of doing well in Ames -- what happens if they don't? The political professionals, like Mike Murphy, think they'll be finished. MIKE MURPHY: The top three in Iowa, if you're not on that list, it's going to be hard to raise a dime after Ames. MARGARET WARNER: Some of the candidates agree there's a lot at risk -- for others, at least.
MARGARET WARNER: Not me, either, say some of Buchanan's rivals. GARY BAUER: Conservative candidates have the advantage of having very committed followers. And I've got about 73,000 donors and I think they would stick with me all the way to Philadelphia, if I didn't do well anywhere. DAN QUAYLE: I can't imagine any campaign deciding on whether they're going to stay in or get out on the Iowa straw poll. I just don't believe that. MARGARET WARNER: Not officially finished, perhaps, says Murphy. MIKE MURPHY: Even if you're dead politically, you keep a phantom campaign alive to collect the matching funds to pay off your debt, and hopefully break even, and go home, get drunk, and forget about the whole wretched exercise. MARGARET WARNER: Financial jump-start or funeral? The candidates will address that for real after the results come in tomorrow night. |
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ELIZABETH
DOLE: How are you doing this morning? I don't know if pigs like to have
their ears scratched or not.
MARGARET
WARNER: -- flipped dozens of pancakes -- and signed hundreds of autographs
-- all in hopes of getting Republicans to come to the campus of Iowa
State University in Ames this Saturday for a day-long presidential straw
poll. The candidates are paying for everything -- from the air-conditioned
buses to ferry voters from around the state -- to the down-home barbeque
--and celebrity guests -- to the $25-a-head admission tickets --
MIKE
MURPHY: A bunch of smart Iowans invented this deal to shake down the
presidential campaigns to raise money for the local party. This was
a fund-raising scam. We'll get these out-of-state slickers to buy a
lot of tickets to the fund-raising dinner, we'll have a phony vote which
they'll be afraid of so we'll sell more tickets, and it's mushroomed
into this ten to twelve thousand people colossus, millions of dollars
spent on it, because the media treats it like it's important. 
MARGARET
WARNER: Texas Gov. George W. Bush, far ahead in national fund-raising
and polls, is battling high expectations. Then there's a contest to
emerge as the establishment alternative to Bush, among former cabinet
official Elizabeth Dole, millionaire publisher Steve Forbes, former
Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, former Vice President Dan Quayle, and
Sen. Orrin Hatch. Finally -- there's a competition to be anointed "the"
choice of Christian conservatives -- among activist Gary Bauer and commentators
Pat Buchanan and Alan Keyes. Quayle and Forbes are making a bid here
too. Only Sen. John McCain has sidestepped the stampede to campaign
elsewhere.
MARGARET
WARNER: Iowa is used to being "first" in the presidential
nominating process. But "first" used to mean the Iowa caucuses
in February of the election year -- when the choosing of convention
delegates actually begins. Straw polls like the one here on Saturday
have no official standing -- or effect. 
LAMAR
ALEXANDER: In football terms, this is the pre-season game. So if you
want to start as quarterback, you better show a pretty good arm. But
out of this, you'll probably get a sense that there are three or four
of us Republicans who can compete to win the Iowa caucuses in January.
And it's probably from that that the Republican nominee will come.
MARGARET
WARNER: Next year's Republican calendar is so compressed, with so many
big states scheduling their primaries in March, that the candidates
are being forced to raise most of their money this year -- under the
shadow of a front-runner who has raised more than all the rest of them
combined. That's where Ames comes in.
MARGARET
WARNER: Most of the candidates are campaigning the old-fashioned, low-budget
Iowa way -- practically one-on-one with the voters --
MARGARET
WARNER: The Bush and Forbes campaigns look -- well -- different. To
start with, since they don't need -- and aren't accepting -- federal
matching campaign funds, there are no limits on what they can spend.
GOV.
GEORGE W. BUSH: There's a pace to a campaign that's important to maintain.
We have got a strategy. And by the time the main events begin, I will
have laid out what I intend to lay out.
PATRICK
BUCHANAN: I understand that if you come to Bush's picnic over there,
you get a date with Reba McIntyre.
PATRICK
BUCHANAN: See that funeral wagon? They're going to have that down in
Ames and they're going to pick up some of the candidates and they're
going to take them out in it. Some are going out in that wagon right
there. (laughs) Not me!