"It Seems to Work"

When the votes are all tallied and the goodbyes said and the clasps of work- thickened hands finished, the lingering flavor of the Iowa caucuses in the chill February night will be rich brownies and giant chunks of fudge mixed with laughter and hugs for neighbors and the silent thanks for the right to do what they have just done. The people of this down-to-earth state will have made the first significant declaration to the world about whom the American electorate has in mind to be the next President. Serious business.

"I can't stand cigar smoke," says Johnson County Farmer Harry Seelman. "I believe in democracy. It's a duty." That is his explanation of why he will rally at least eight of his twelve children, load them with his wife Lucille into the family's gray 1980 Chevy Citation (a veteran of 105,000 dusty miles) and head to Union Township's caucus in nearby West High School for the clear and open ritual of boosting Massachusetts Democratic Governor Mike Dukakis. No back-room dealing for Seelman. And no pussyfooting on the tough issues. "The Dukakis farm plan is not as good as Gephardt's," says Seelman, whose land has been in the family for more than 150 years. "It's just the sense of the man. Franklin Roosevelt didn't know much about farming, but he knew what to do. He saved us."

They no longer need emergency treatment out in Iowa, but they want some help as they weave modern industry and service into the old, faltering heartland matrix of small towns and family farms. These crafty Iowans have stopped feeling sorry for themselves because of the agriculture price collapse and have begun hustling. They make gin and vodka out of surplus corn, and they are thinking about growing strawberries and snails as well as soybeans. There are deer herds in the valleys, and the pheasant population is 2 million, which is not like hogs (13.8 million) or cattle (4.6 million) or even people (2.8 million), but it all means economic diversity and jobs.

The caucus process has become an industry in itself, which is somewhat troubling. State leaders see a gain from big media attention. Des Moines Restaurant Impresario Guido Fenu figures to do an extra $20,000 in business because of the political groupies who now inundate the Savery Hotel. James Barnes, chief political reporter for the National Journal, sought out a "typical" Republican home in Des Moines to witness the reaction to the debate of the candidates a fortnight ago. When he arrived, a crew from the C- SPAN network was in the living room, and one from a local station soon rolled up. The housewife loved it all, a newly crowned media queen.

Iowa keeps 93% of its rich loam in farms, the heritage of a century of building a special culture on that treasure. There are in Iowa eight cities with populations over 50,000 but none with more than 200,000. Crowding is almost nonexistent, and so the attendant evils of crime and hopelessness are minimal. The core of the population also has some link to those people who first halted on the tallgrass prairie and sank their plows. Writes Author John Madson, an eloquent native Iowan: "Grassland of such magnitude was wholly alien to the western European mind. It diminished men's works and revealed them to a vast and critical sky, and forced people into new ways of looking at the land and themselves and changed them forever."