Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere

Author:Edward-Isaac Dovere [Dovere, Edward-Isaac]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

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“This shit would really be interesting if we weren’t right in the middle of it,” David Axelrod remembers Obama saying to him during one of the long drives around Iowa in the 2008 campaign. Being in the middle of it is terrible. The state is full of amateur pundits and political experts who’ve seen all the candidates and listened to all the speeches, and have a confidence in their own insight and ability to measure up anyone, wrapped in a haughty self-serious sense of duty to the nation. Imagine trying to get a room full of five-year-olds to agree on the best ice-cream flavor ever. Andrew Yang had a joke about doing the math and each Iowan voter being worth a thousand Californians—“In any other state in the country, I’d be lying to you if I said your vote could make a big difference, but here, it can. You only need about forty thousand Iowans to change the future of this country.” He wasn’t arguing this was good for democracy. He was appealing to the state’s collective political ego.

Now throw in an impeachment trial in a race full of senators being forced to spend long and ultimately pointless days listening to the pomp and the proceedings as if the verdict hadn’t been set since before Pelosi approved the House vote.

Cory Booker tried to hold on until caucus night. Sitting in the front seat of an SUV at the end of the first week in January, he headed back to the airport after his second day trip to Iowa in three days, rubbing his fingers up and down his nose and trying to make the case for staying in. He couldn’t. “If we get folks to hear my message and feel my spirit, we will win this election,” he was saying. If he had been able to campaign full time in Iowa, “we would have run away with this.”

Booker was riding toward Cedar Rapids from a town called Mount Vernon, at what turned out to be the final event of his campaign. It was held in a library down the street from the piano bar where, ten months earlier, O’Rourke had stood on a counter, waving his arms around, managing to get praised for ducking a question on ethanol. A woman at the library had given Booker an original Jimmy Carter 1976 campaign button, and he showed it off as if it were a talisman that could ward off the inevitable.

Booker’s last hope had been to get on the debate stage in January in Des Moines, for what would be the first time that the audience was more than just reporters and diehards whose minds were already made up. In December, Perez had decided that the contestants needed more than one moderate and more than one woman, and retrofitted the thresholds to allow Amy Klobuchar to qualify. He did not make the same accommodation for Booker, who was the last of the Black or Latino candidates running—Harris dropped out,

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