NY Times: DES MOINES — The other day, as his sport utility vehicle idled outside, former President Bill Clinton held forth on a sofa in the publisher’s suite at The Des Moines Register, explaining why he believed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton should win the newspaper’s coveted endorsement.
Only nine days earlier, the Clintons had played host to a few top editors for drinks and appetizers at one of Des Moines’s fashionable new restaurants. But on this visit, Mr. Clinton was the closer in the exhaustive campaign of persuasion. Even after an hour he had not made his full case to Laura Hollingsworth, the new publisher, so he called back later in the day.
“Hi, it’s Bill Clinton,” he said, speaking slowly after reaching only voice mail. “I’m just calling to thank Laura for the meeting today. There was one more point I wanted to make, but I’ll keep trying to find her. Anyway, I enjoyed it, and I appreciate the time. Thanks.”
Two days after the former president dropped by, Ms. Hollingsworth smiled as she played the recorded message for a reporter during an interview in her office.
“It was humbling and I was honored to meet with him, but I wouldn’t say it sways me at all,” she said. “In this whole process, star-struck is the least of it.”
Presidential candidates of both parties have long dutifully appeared before the editorial board of The Register, Iowa’s most influential newspaper. But this year the Democrats, particularly Mrs. Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, have gone to extraordinary lengths to win over the publisher, the editor and the editorial page editor ahead of endorsements — one for the Republican field and one for the Democrats — expected to be published on Sunday, 18 days before the caucuses that kick off the voting to select the parties’ nominees.
In a campaign where a woman has a real shot at winning the Democratic nomination and the election, it has escaped no one’s notice that for the first time in the paper’s history, the top three figures on the six-member board are all women: Ms. Hollingsworth; Carolyn Washburn, the paper’s editor; and Carol Hunter, the editorial page editor. All three dismiss any notion that gender will influence their decision.
“Because there are three women at the top of the endorsement process,” Ms. Washburn said, “we’re really aware people will read things into that, so we’ve been really conscious about that and really deliberate in checking and balancing with each other.”
Whether the endorsement will deliver enough votes to make a difference in the Iowa race is of course an open question. Yet each of the Democratic campaigns has vigorously pursued it, hoping to build momentum in the final weeks.
The paper has tended to endorse Democrats in the general election. So while the Republican candidates have all attended at least one editorial board meeting, the leading Democratic candidates and an array of surrogates have devoted hours to personal visits, telephone calls and written messages in hopes of obtaining the endorsement. Members of the editorial board have in turn conducted dozens of hours of interviews, studied thousands of pages of position papers and even read books by or about the candidates.
Four years ago, John Edwards won the endorsement, which he believes helped propel him to a second-place finish in the caucuses. With the three top decision makers on the board all having assumed their positions since then, several campaigns set out on clandestine research expeditions, tracking down their biographies, editorials they have written, even their personal voting histories.
As the board’s decision neared, efforts at persuasion peaked, particularly from the Clinton campaign. Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, a leading surrogate, made an unsolicited call to Ms. Washburn. Calls to the board’s office were also made by former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Gen. Wesley Clark, each of whom had been given the task of raising a different element of Mrs. Clinton’s experience.
“When Gen. Wesley Clark called, I was on deadline and I needed to get some pages out,” Ms. Hunter said in an interview in her office, which was filled with stacks of position papers and campaign literature. “And I had to just tell him, ‘I’m sorry, General Clark, if you want to call me later, that’s fine,’ but I had other work to do.”
Pausing for a moment, she added in a cheerful voice: “At a certain point, celebrity isn’t going to wow us. In that sense, it can almost be off-putting. You sort of felt the power of the political machines at times, really trying to put the pressure on.”
A final burst of courtship unfolded Thursday at a nationally televised Democratic debate moderated by Ms. Washburn, who had been criticized by candidates at a Republican debate the previous day for discouraging them from engaging one another aggressively and for asking them to raise their hands to answer a question on global warming.
As the Democrats debated, Mrs. Clinton chimed in, “Carolyn, do you want to ask us to raise our hands about global warming?” None of the candidates left the stage before stopping to shake Ms. Washburn’s hand, the final act to a methodical pursuit that began shortly after the presidential campaign got under way nearly 10 months ago.
The first get-to-know-you invitation from a candidate came several months ago: Mr. Obama invited Ms. Washburn and Ms. Hunter to chat over drinks in a private dining room above Centro, a downtown restaurant here. (They all drank water.)
Not long afterward, Mrs. Clinton scheduled a Sunday breakfast meeting with the editorial board at her West Des Moines hotel.
It did not go so well.
“I think they thought it was going to be a more chatty meet-and-greet kind of event than it was,” Ms. Washburn said. “Her staff called and said: ‘That was a pretty intense conversation. Maybe you didn’t get to see her lighter side. Would you like to do that again?’ ”
The next time, Mr. Clinton was on hand with his wife and aides at a secluded balcony table at Azalea, one of the city’s newest restaurants. They talked for nearly two hours with editors, a columnist and two reporters from The Register, and by the time the evening ended, the table was crowded with supporters of Mrs. Clinton, including Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, who happened to be in town.
As hundreds of reporters and campaign operatives descend upon Iowa, the imminent endorsement is powering the wheels of speculation. Will the presence of three women at the helm of the editorial board benefit Mrs. Clinton or hurt her chances? Will the previous endorsement of Mr. Edwards carry over?
The campaigns intend to deploy young aides to the printing presses at the edge of town on Saturday night, looking for an early copy even before the endorsement appears on the paper’s Web site.
Howie P.S.: The Boston Globe has just endorsed Barack Obama.
Barack Obama
NY Times:
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