Welcome To My Iowa Adventure

Tonight I'm leaving the warm 70 degree weather of my parents' house in Los Angeles for the bitter cold of an Iowa winter. I graduated college last week and instead of lying on a beach, I'll be chasing candidates in the snow.

And I couldn't be happier!

Iowa is home to the first serious test of the 2008 election calendar and, while this election-cycle has already been over a year long, it could also be over in the blink of an eye. That's the potential Iowa has in its role as the official start of the race to the White House.

Confession: I have no idea what is going to happen in the Iowa caucuses.

Another confession: Neither does anyone else.

For the first time in decades, the nominations of both parties are up for grabs and for all the talk about "frontrunners" in the national polls, the early contests of Iowa and New Hampshire are dogfights. No one knows for certain who's going to win these first-in-the-nation contests, and if they say otherwise they're lying.

National polls are meaningless in these two states where most voters actually meet the candidates before heading to the ballot box or caucus venue; there is a woman in New Hampshire who says she has never voted for a candidate she hasn't danced with. Everyone outside of Iowa and New Hampshire is waiting to see what happens on January 3rd and 8th. That's why I'm heading to Iowa.

Iowa is where the candidates can be found in school cafeteria answering questions not from moderators but from citizens who are still undecided. Iowa is where hundreds of volunteers are spending their holiday season handing out buttons and bumper stickers in 20 degree weather (on a nice day!) for candidates who may be trailing in the polls. Iowa is where retail politics survive and where the first battle will be fought, the first judgments made.

Iowans have a funny way about them. Sometimes, they are soothsayers, seeing something within candidates that the rest of the nation can't. In 1976 Jimmy Carter went from being Jimmy Who to the Democratic Party nominee by winning the Iowa caucuses. But sometimes their verdicts are not shared by the rest of the country. Witness 1988, when both George Bush and Michael Dukakis finished THIRD in their caucuses, and yet both went on to win the nomination.

I keep hearing that Hillary Clinton is on this "likeability" tour. I want to see if she's likeable. I see that Mike Huckabee has taken Iowa by storm. I want to learn why. I hear that a lot of voters are impressed with Joe Biden. I want to know why that's not translating into favorable poll numbers. Mitt Romney spent between 7 and 8 million dollars in Iowa. What has he gotten for that money?

It's with an inquistive mind that I head out into the cold to figure out what this whole Iowa thing is all about.

Welcome to my Iowa adventure.