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My rental car trailed a plume of dust as I sped south down route 25 toward tiny Greenfield, 60 miles from Des Moines, to intersect with the former mayor of New York City. His event had been announced for days, noted in The Des Moines Register among the activities of the other stumping candidates, and, running late, I thought I'd miss all the action. Two SUVs parked near an intersection on otherwise uncluttered streets offered the only hint of a city slicker's visit.
Behind the cars stood the Nodaway Diner, and that's where I found Rudy, seriously unplugged. Any advance work was truly invisible. No lights, no sound, no script. And almost no people: just Rudy and seven folks to chew the fat as he digested his Nodaway Burger, the house specialty. The only other patrons were four elderly ladies—Elsie, Rita, Margaret, and Opal—playing pinochle and ignoring the din. Diner owner Vicky Eshelman told me that John Edwards once packed the place, but Pottawattamie County Supervisor Loren Knauss, chairing Rudy's effort here, defended the former mayor's tactics. "He's not interested in standing there and preaching," he told me. "Sitting down at a table and talking to a group of people, I mean, that's Iowa politics."
Giuliani ignored a basic rule of advance—crowds imply momentum to reporters—but he was lucky. He was traveling with Adam Nagourney, national political correspondent for The New York Times (and no ordinary reporter), and Ben Werschkul, a Times video producer who packaged the event for the newspaper's website. Nagourney's Greenfield dateline transmitted this lunch break globally. Werschkul's three-minute companion video did for Giuliani what Mitt TV does for Romney, but cost nothing and came with the Times's third-party validation that Mitt TV can't match.
It's early enough that this matters. After the caucuses, the retail politicking of diners, bakeries, and ice cream parlors will yield to touch-and-go rallies in airport hangars. In Nagourney's story, headlined "Iowans Check for Dirt Under Giuliani's Nails", he offered a sympathetic portrait of the mayor's "unconventional tour through tiny farming communities in the rolling hills of western Iowa." Even if uttered to only seven people, Giuliani's assurance, reported in the Times, that "I'm not going to forget the little guy anywhere," elevated perception of his appeal in the state with none of the nuisance—or expense—of full-blown advance work. In Werschkul's similarly evocative video, "A Big City Mayor in a Small Town", Nagourney, narrating, says, "Since we were in such remote parts of the state, and since there were so few reporters and people there, we were really able to get up close and listen and watch." He adds, "I've been covering trips like this for a long time and this was one of the more unusual ones that I've covered in Iowa."
As Giuliani spokeswoman Maria Comella told me, distancing the former mayor's campaign from Romney's, "It may not mean we're spending money for a band or pulled pork on a hamburger bun, but what we are doing is taking the time to sit down to have that conversation." Measuring publicity against cost—the price of a Nodaway burger—the gambit paid off, a boon to Giuliani's prospects in Iowa and elsewhere. In Greenfield, the Nodaway Seven offered a lesson missing in most advance manuals: Less is sometimes more.
