A friend was just telling me about her near death experience while living in N Dakota. On her way to work her car got stuck in a snowdrift. She decided to get out & walk a block back to her home. Immediately felt the sensation of sleepiness & wanted to just sit down. Had to force herself to keep walking. People don’t realize how powerful that deep cold is.
In 2008, Clinton couldn’t buy Iowans’ love. So she bought them snow shovels.
By David A. Fahrenthold, washpost.com, June 6, 2015
AMES, Iowa — In Phyllis Peters’s garage, there is a snow shovel. A nice one: green, shiny, with an ergonomic steel handle. It came from Hillary Rodham Clinton. And it plays a part in a modern-day political legend, about some of the strangest money a candidate has ever spent.
Eight years ago, Peters was a volunteer for Clinton’s first presidential run. She had been an admirer of Clinton since her time as first lady. But just before Clinton lost the Iowa caucuses, her staffers did something odd: They bought shovels for Peters and the hundreds of other volunteers. “If you’re in Iowa, you have a snow shovel” already, Peters said. But she accepted. To be nice. This is Iowa. “We’re not rude people,” Peters said.
Today, the story of Clinton’s snow shovels is being told again in Iowa, as supporters worry that her second campaign could repeat the mistakes of the first. For both those who gave out the shovels and those who received them, they came to symbolize a candidate who never quite got their home state.
Clinton doesn’t face near the same challenge in Iowa in 2016. But the state still matters as a test of basic politics, a gauge of whether she has gotten any better at connecting with the people she wants to vote for her.
Last time around, Clinton tried to win over Iowans with bloodless logic, touting her résumé and her grinding work ethic. When that fell short, Clinton’s well-funded campaign — unable to buy her love — started buying everything else.
An expensive chartered “Hill-a-copter.” A $95,000 order of deli sandwiches. And 600-odd new snow shovels, some of which still sit, unused, in basements and garages across Iowa.
The idea behind them seemed to be that Clinton’s own voters might be so old, or so un-enthused, that they wouldn’t leave the house if it snowed. And that Clinton’s own Iowa volunteers — if sent on a voter-rescue mission — might not be prepared for . . . winter. In Iowa.
“It’s sort of like, ‘Yeah, I’ll take a snow shovel,’ ” said Marisue Hartung, one of Peters’s fellow Clinton volunteers in Ames. “But why?”
The story of the snow shovels starts way back in the fall of 2007. At that time, Clinton — a second-term senator from New York — was crushing Barack Obama in national polls,up 20 points. In Iowa, she was up by a handful. But already, Clinton staffers were discovering a problem here:
There were large numbers of elderly people. Shift workers. Single mothers. All people who might be too tired, or too busy, to come out and vote the way Iowans vote: with their feet, in a gym, in a long caucus night of speechifying and waiting around.
“We left, and we all wanted to go drink. It was like, ‘I don’t know what a caucus is,’ ” said one Clinton staffer from the 2008 campaign. “We realized that, like, we were going to lose because we weren’t going to be able to get out all of these Hillary supporters” to stay as long as it took to be counted.
So Clinton needed more people. New people. She was pouring resources into Iowa. But so was Obama, and his soaring message of hope and change was spreading among the kind of people who really would come to a caucus and stay.
To Clinton, by contrast, politics was not about soaring. It was about grinding — a constant, incremental struggle — and she was the candidate who could succeed at it. That might have been true. But it was hardly the stuff of joy.
“We all want change,” she would say. “Some people believe you bring it about by hoping for it. I believe you bring about change by working really, really hard for it.”
The other problem was Clinton’s distance — both emotional and real. Even when she was in Iowa, it felt as if she wasn’t.
Obama “would get on a bus, and he would go from town to town to town, and people would ride on the bus with him. People would get to know him,” said Chris Gowen, who was part of Clinton’s advance team. “Whereas we would fly into Des Moines . . . then dart back to the airport, and fly to northern Iowa, then dart back to the airport.”
“We were spending all this money,” he said. “And you’d never really connect with people.” As the Jan. 3 caucuses approached, Iowa seemed to be slipping away from Clinton. But her campaign still had money coming in — on some days, more than $1 million. And money is for spending. With Iowa still theoretically in play, there would be no prizes for saving it.
“The reality is, the closer you get to an election day, the harder it is to spend money in a smart way,” said Karen Hicks, a senior adviser to Clinton’s 2008 campaign. It was getting too late to buy ad time on television, or print up new fliers, or train new staff, before the caucuses. “It gets harder to spend in a way that you can tie to an incremental vote or caucus victory.”
At a time like that, Hicks said, “you probably should stop spending.”
The campaign didn’t.
It spent big on the “Hill-a-copter,” a Bell 222 with leather seats that the campaign chartered, trying to hit 16 Iowa counties in five days. News reports put the cost at thousands per day.
Even when it worked, this was not a perfect idea. Clinton — seeking to project a common touch — would meet voters by descending from the sky.
An even more last-minute purchase was the $95,384 order of deli sandwiches from the Hy-Vee grocery chain. The Iowa tradition was to bring munchies, not meals. But the Clinton people were worried about their young mothers and shift workers. Would they skip the caucuses if it meant waiting hours to eat?
And then: the shovels.
“I remember when they were ordered. There was an actual conversation about is there anything else, you know. ‘We are sure that we can’t purchase any more phone time?’ ‘Are we sure that we can’t purchase any more flights of mail?’ ” said the former Clinton campaign staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relations with the current campaign.
The shovels were bought, and they were distributed to offices and precinct captains by campaign staff. It’s not clear, from campaign-finance records, what they cost — but it seems certain to have been at least $10,000.
In hindsight, there is debate about why snow shovels appeared to be a better choice than nothing.
Some people saw them as a metaphor: a physical reminder that Clinton’s volunteers were needed to get their people out, come hell or high water — or snow.
“I think the same thing could have been accomplished by giving out a key chain with a snow shovel on it that costs 30 cents,” said the former Clinton staffer.
Hicks said this was a preemptive maneuver, grabbing a valuable resource before the enemy did. And if voters didn’t stay home, there was another worry: caucus sites. Snowy walks. Voters might not make it to the door.
Maybe. But, again, if you live in Iowa, you probably have a shovel.
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