JULY 2ND–3RD

Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Washington, Davenport, Cedar Rapids, Car Politics

It’s been a long, boring summer and it’s only July. July 2003, to be exact, nearly a year and a half before two people you would never invite over to dinner, and probably wouldn’t want to live in your town, will come head to head in the 2004 presidential election.

The weather never changes in San Francisco, it’s always sweater weather, never cold enough for a coat, and for the past two months I’ve been dating a demon woman down in San Leandro who eats at places like Applebee’s and swears if I ever write anything about her I’ll be sorry. She’s already cut me four times with a scalpel. When things started to go bad between us, after she nearly tore my rotator cuff at 10:30 on a Saturday morning, I told her I was running off to join the campaign trail early. She said I’d be back. She didn’t even question why someone would get on the trail a year and a half before the election. Just a couple of weeks ago she had told me that I better not cheat on her, but then followed it by saying she knew I wouldn’t anyway. She said I wanted her to be angry, but she wasn’t going to indulge me in that.

I could write about politics from my studio in San Francisco, but San Francisco doesn’t matter when it comes to the big game. Whatever washed over San Francisco forty years ago, back when they were running naked in Golden Gate Park and killing people at Rolling Stones concerts and getting Clean for Gene, has left a residue of gray political impotence, a city so far left it has ceased to exist. San Francisco liberals, they call them. In political circles it’s the worst thing someone can say. It means you don’t matter, you’re worthless, you’re dog shit, get out of my way. The country doesn’t care what San Francisco thinks. No, I need to go where the action is, the fertile plain, the glistening bio-diesel stalks of Iowa, the libertarian hills of New Hampshire.

I meet my photographer, Stefan, at Eastern Iowa Airport, and we pick up an Enterprise economy and beeline to the University of Iowa, home of the Hawkeyes. Howard Dean is scheduled to speak at seven p.m.

“Do you think he has a chance?” Stefan asks me. He’s more of a realist than I am. We met in Israel, where I was spending time with rock-throwing children, putting together an article for a magazine nobody’s ever heard of. Stefan was on the other side of the line taking...