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Taking a page from Rudy Giuliani's Unplugged album, the stop in Atlantic, Iowa, on Barack Obama's "Road to Change" tour tried mightily to make more seem like less. To the untrained eye, his team pulled it off. Atlantic is an odd name for a landlocked patch of Iowa, and legend has it that its founders, plotting their position midway between the coasts, flipped a coin to derive the moniker. Planning a stop in Atlantic in order to serve a bicoastal message, Obama advance people were far less random in their designs.
I arrived at the Cass County Fairgrounds, a patch of land dominated by a 7,700-square-foot Community Center, and opened in 2001 at a cost of $1.6 million. As a wedding venue, it accommodates 500 people in air-conditioned splendor. Event organizers placing priority on crowd comfort over campaign optics could have easily planted their flag there as the preferred venue. Yet it remained largely empty the day Senator Obama stopped in, used only as a holding room for his family and a work space for a few reporters.
The event was held, instead, in the open-air, dirt-floored Show Barn that offered, for one day, a display of stylized politics instead of prize cattle. Leaving his Winnebago, Obama descended an embankment with his Secret Service escort, perambulated a corral, and arrived in a rustic theater-in-the-round; cameras on one side, Iowans on the other, cascading down wooden bleachers, and Obama sandwiched in between. Down from the rafters hung pairs of U.S. and Iowa flags, seemingly native but for their new boxes seen offstage and the vendor's key light bathing them gently. The vendors, Brad and Kirk from 16th Avenue Music in Cedar Rapids, were the same crew from Hillary Clinton's Council Bluffs rally held two days earlier.
Roofing nails in hand, nonchalantly hammering into place an art room–style "Road to Change" banner made of butcher paper, was site advance J.P. Eby. Eby's job, under trip lead Rick Siger, was to create this "potluck" as it if hadn't been created at all.
But making the outdoors option work took days. Steve Olsen, who oversees the site for Iowa State University, told me, "That was what the campaign workers decided they want as the image they want to present with the candidate." The county fair residuum, stored beneath the barn's roof, disappeared, to be replaced by seats, sound, press stands, and, finally, the butcher-paper banner. "It took some work to get everything cleared out and ready," Olsen said, pointing to the barn, "and there it is."
Through the lens, it was a sterling rural scene, redolent of an October 1992 bus tour stop created for the Clintons and Gores in an Ocala, Florida, rodeo arena. That event got reporters gushing over Clinton's potential to win in horse country, a Republican stronghold. Obama's tour employs the same choreography to project red-state allure. Among other witnesses this time around, with hi-def camera in hand, was Amy Rice, a documentary filmmaker who has followed Obama since early in his run. Her gauzy footage in the barn, should Obama prevail, might appear as a sequel to Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker's 1993 classic, The War Room. The "Road to Change" is long, though, with many turns ahead. Compared to the up-tempo velocity at which Obama and others will travel after Iowa, his Road to Change feels, as intended, like a slow walk down a country lane.
