by John McCormick, updated
WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — Iowa’s most influential political columnist is questioning the tactics of Sen. Barack Obama when it comes to encouraging college students not originally from Iowa to participate in the state’s Jan. 3 precinct caucuses.
In his online column for The Des Moines Register, David Yepsen notes that there is nothing illegal about what Obama’s campaign is proposing in a brochure being distributed to 50,000 students in the state.
“This raises the question of whether it’s fair, or politically smart,” Yepsen writes. “No presidential campaign in memory has ever made such a large, open attempt to encourage students from out of state, many of whom pay out-of-state tuition, to participate in the caucuses. No other campaign appears to be doing it in this campaign cycle.”
Obama’s campaign is telling college students in a brochure that: “If you are not from Iowa, you can come back for the Iowa caucus and caucus in your college neighborhood.”Yepsen’s piece was written under the headline “The Illinois Caucus,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to the large number of Illinois natives who attend school in Iowa, especially at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. (A Tribune story in October, linked here, looked at campaign efforts to organize the college vote in Iowa.)
“It’s not the first time Obama has profited from the fact he’s from an adjacent state,” Yepsen writes. “Illinois residents routinely show up at the candidate’s events in eastern Iowa. (The first question Obama took at an Iowa town meeting was from a guy from Naperville.)”
A news story in the newspaper today, meanwhile, downplayed the likelihood of non-Iowa residents participating in the first-in-the-nation caucuses, quoting Iowa Secretary of State Michael Mauro as saying he thought Obama’s instruction to college students were “playing within the rules.”
Yepsen’s column triggered a response this morning from the campaign of Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, one of Obama’s Democratic competitors.
“I was deeply disappointed to read today about the Obama campaign’s attempt to recruit thousands of out-of-state residents to come to Iowa for the caucuses,” Dodd’s Iowa Director Julie Andreeff-Jensen said in a statement. “‘New Politics’ shouldn’t be about scheming to evade either the spirit or the letter of the rules that guide the process. That may be the way politics is played in Chicago, but not in Iowa.”
Responding to some criticism from the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, Obama’s spokesman issued a statement Saturday evening during the middle of a Democratic candidate forum in Des Moines.
“Rather than denigrating the caucus rights of students who go to school in Iowa, we would suggest the Clinton campaign organize them,” spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement. “Their attack here is borne out of pure political frustration. Iowans are determined to launch a winning candidate for the Democratic Party to bring real change for our country. They will not be deterred by efforts to dampen participation and 11th-hour attacks.”
