"It Seems to Work"

Monday, Jan. 25, 1988 By HUGH SIDEY

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Indeed, many of the first adventurers hurried on to the Rocky Mountains to trap beaver. Gold seekers cursed the great weathers of the grass country that seared them in summer and drove iced spikes into their souls in winter. Had they looked down, they would have seen earth that in 1900, only a half-century later, would produce 1 1/2 times the wealth put out by all the world's gold mines. But coaxing wealth from sun and soil and water is a process of patience and presence. Nomads have little understanding of that life, and movement is much of presidential politics.

This opening struggle for the presidency is a roving and restless assault on the sensibilities of the Iowans. The candidates and their handlers come in droves, encased in gleaming jets, dressed in dark pinstripes and tasseled shoes, determined to make the caucuses a stage that their men can exploit. Events propel them so rapidly that even if they wanted to understand Iowa, they would not have time. Hence George Bush talks about debutante parties as if Dubuque were Greenwich, and Gary Hart thinks he can somehow walk away from an indulgent weekend. Pete du Pont promotes school vouchers that just might sink a lot of Iowa community schools already pressed to keep up the high quality established when corn sold high. Though Paul Simon, Richard Gephardt and Bob Dole come from neighboring states, they are power dwellers, long gone from the quiet desperations of Main Street. Anyway, they cannot linger too long. Iowa is January's campground for media on the presidential march.

Almost daily some story or broadcast is sent out from Iowa that laments the "bleak and frozen landscape." Frozen it is, sometimes as deep as five feet if no snow cover comes to hold in the natural heat. But bleak? Bleak is in the eye of the beholder. Eagles congregate in winter along the Mississippi. Kids whack cans across frozen ponds and belly flop on their sleds down crystalline hills. And on some nights, with moonlight glazing the fields, come the howls of coyotes, a surviving shiver from other centuries when great adventure lay over that uncharted horizon.

"I'll take the Iowa caucus as an accurate measure more seriously than the New Hampshire primary," insists Writer Madson. Its political system is almost free of corruption. Its kids always score among the top on national exams. "The accident of the caucuses in Iowa is a happy accident," declares Novelist Frank Conroy, a transplanted Easterner.

Yet Iowans were, and perhaps are, capable of some rascality. George Mills, Iowa journalist and historian, relates that in the early caucuses the requirement that time and place be posted on a tree was sometimes met by partisans' peeling the bark away, nailing the notice on the bare spot, then tacking the bark back over the notice. Once, says Mills, progressives found an old barn that they torched just as the Republican caucus began, and the unwitting standpatters rushed out of the hall to help with the fire while the progressives stayed, voted their will, then adjourned.