The Folks with First Say

Monday, Jan. 25, 1988 By WALTER SHAPIRO

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Why Iowa indeed? It is fine for David Oman, the co-chairman of the state Republican Party, to claim, "Iowa is a good place to start. This is mid- America, and most of us live in small towns. The state is very open, clean and fair. There are no political-machine bosses to dominate the debate, and we are very much a two-party state with a level playing field." All true, and these high-minded attributes taken by themselves would be enough to make Iowa the Miss Congeniality of presidential politics. But Midwestern hospitality, admirable as it may be, does not compensate for the lack of diversity that undermines Iowa's claims as the nation's leading test market for Campaign '88.

For by almost every reckoning, the state, if not quite Wonder bread, is at least whole wheat: overwhelmingly white and largely Protestant and middle class. Only about 2% of Iowa's 2.8 million people are black or Hispanic. The state's proportion of foreign-born residents is equally minuscule. At the Waterloo Rotary Club recently, the toastmaster told an ethnic joke -- about Norwegians from Minnesota.

Urban problems are largely an abstraction. Des Moines, the state's capital and largest city, has a population of 183,000, and its revitalized downtown area more closely resembles a suburban shopping mall than a major city. In Iowa, crime is something that happens on television: the state's rate of violent crime is 60% lower than the national average. Iowans frequently boast of never locking their doors; politeness remains almost a state religion. As Roxanne Conlin, the unsuccessful 1982 Democratic gubernatorial nominee, jokes, "Being rude and killing someone are about on par here."

Iowans have a solidity and a temperance that make the state seem like an outpost of Lake Wobegon. The Hawkeye State first embraced Prohibition in 1882, and the lemonade legacy remains: Iowans drink less liquor per capita than the residents of any state save West Virginia, where illegal moonshine is not counted in the standings. Des Moines is the Jell-O-eating capital of the nation. Cakes are still made from scratch: consumers buy ingredients like baking chocolate at roughly double the national norm.

Marketers view Iowans as stubbornly resistant to change; they are unlikely to be the first to try new types of products. "I would take a new tartar- control toothpaste into Des Moines or the Quad Cities because it wouldn't require people to change their behavior by brushing their teeth more," theorizes Watts Wacker, senior vice president of the survey-research firm of Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. "But I wouldn't take a tartar-control mouthwash there, because that requires change in usage patterns." Iowans are even contrariant enough to believe still in the superiority of American automobiles: foreign-car sales are only half the national average.