‘Fired up!’
‘Ready to go!’
‘Fired up!’
‘Ready to go!’

200 young people are engaged in call-and-response chanting with each other, crammed in to the corner of the canteen of the Iowa City Senior Citizens Center. In the opposite corner, 30 or so senior citizens wait blankly for the noise to subside, occasionally shaking their heads wearily. It’s a peculiar enough sight in itself; all the more peculiar given that it comes right in the middle of the Iowa Caucus, the first stage of the most important electoral race in the world.

Three hours earlier, at 6pm, things are considerably calmer. Susanna Peters is enthusing about the process that is unique to Iowa and – less famously – Nevada. “I love the caucus. I was here for the first one in 1972. It’s a wonderful opportunity to participate in democracy,” she says, gesturing at a still empty room that will soon transform into a kind of democratic circus. Actually, circuses tend to have fixed programmes of entertainment, fixed designated areas, and widely-understood rules. The caucus at Precinct 20 was more like watching spontaneous democratic combustion.

Thanks to a sly nod and a wink Tom and I sneaked into the caucus room early, with a promise to help move chairs and sandwiches. The atmosphere inside is more bake-sale fundraiser than red-hot crucible of democracy to begin with – but outside the room the embattled chairman Richard Tooey is trying to sign in four times as many people as expected. All at once. The queue snakes outside into the bitter cold (10 Farenheit at best) – comparisons to the first post-apartheid elections in South Africa would be an exaggeration, but these Iowans are remarkably dedicated.

Senior citizens are admitted into the canteen first, and dodder dutifully towards the Hillary corner, for the most part. Edwards and Obama occupy the two other available corners, with flyers and policy brochures speckling the chintzy chairs; the six ’second tier’ candidates are located in smaller areas, mostly under hand-written signs.

The small Dennis Kucinich group bemoan Clinton’s supporters stealing their chairs, but they’re also looking happy. A few are members of a local co-operative, and tell me their initial preference for the most liberal (i.e. left-wing) of the Democratic candidates is a case of choosing the lesser of nine evils.

“If you look at the political compass, all these candidates are so close together,” Julie says. Alex, a philosophy graduate from the university, agrees. “I think people need reminding that a lot of us aren’t happy with the two party system at all.” Another apparent Kucinich-ite chimes in: “I wouldn’t actually vote for Kucinich in the event that he won the nomination – I’d vote third party in the general (election, in November). I’m only here tonight to make my voice heard.”

Little does she know how loud she’ll have to shout to do this tonight.

When the doors finally close the room is absurdly packed – a record 381 people have turned out to vote – we had been told to expect about 100. The clean lines of chairs have been blurred, and the Obama corner spills out to occupy most of the centre of the room. It’s difficult to overstate just how much of a generational divide there is between the Clinton and Obama groups. 90% of Obama’s supporters in the room are under 30; 90% of Clinton’s supporters in the room are over 50. “I’m not sure about their reasons for choosing him,” Clinton precinct captain Dennis will say later, “but I am glad the young people are turning out. It bodes well.”

Caucus rules dictate that any candidate group failing to get 15% is no longer ‘viable’ – they don’t then drop out completely, but have a chance to realign behind another candidate; there are three rounds of this realigning, and the following hour in which they proceed witness the most fast-paced, confusing, and intense bartering seen outside of the New York stock exchange.

Debate in the Kucinich camp is heated – the candidate himself had signalled that his supporters should switch to Obama if he became non-viable in any precinct, but a bright young man called Cory, John Edwards’ precinct captain, is offering a deal within minutes of the debate starting: for the 10 Kucinich supporters they need to attain viability, he’ll offer one of them a chance to be sent as a delegate to the Iowan Democratic hub in Des Moines, where resolutions are then sent on to the Democratic National Convention in the summer.

“What do I have to do to get you over there? We have cookies!” Cody says with a smile.

Headcounts are being done and redone in every corner of the room. “I’m confused” is a regularly heard refrain among the vibrant hubbub. “So let me get this straight…” is another. Joe Biden’s captain makes a move for Hillary, and tries to take his non-plussed fellow supporters with him. People stand on chairs and attempt to martial the chaos. Calls are placed to the Iowa Democratic Party amid the din, checking and re-checking rules.

“Any hairs I had left on my head have been replaced by sweat follicles” Richard gasps at me, smiling through the pressure.

The Hillary gang, expected to be vying with Obama for first place, still aren’t quorate despite a few extra Biden defectors. 56 is the magic number everyone needs for viability, and the younger members of the Clinton gang are getting more desperate:

“We only need three more people for a delegate!” a young woman shouts from atop a plastic chair.

“If you don’t get her in it’s going to be 20 years til we get a woman President” someone shouts above the clamour.

“I’ll raise you ten – make it 30 years!” an Obama supporter shouts, slightly nastily.

“Make Hillary viable! Come on people!”

“Screw Hillary!”

Friendly faces are becoming tightened by the intensity of it all. Richard vainly tries to reassert some authority over the catcalling, chanting Obama supporters and the still vote-seeking Clinton team. Time is running out:

“Come on, they’ve had enough time, pack it in. They can’t keep trying to get votes indefinitely!” come the cries from the Obama corner.

But still the noise and pleading for Clinton continues: “come on people! Just two more votes now!”

“They’ve had enough time! Stop CHEATING! This is ridiculous!”

“This is DEMOCRACY!” comes back the cry. The Clinton rallier stalls further, counting heads. “I think we need a proper recount.” This is too much for the Obama supporters, feeling their victory is being indefinitely postponed. Boos start to ring out.

“Stop being so immature!” a middle-aged woman shouts at them, genuinely angry. Faces turn red, arguments continue. Finally the delegates are allocated: five to Obama, two to Edwards, (of whom one will eventually be for Kucinich, if the Kucinich defector so chooses).

The Obama students have won in incredible number – getting comfortably over 200 of the 381 votes. They flood out to the bars across the street, happy and ready for a beer. The Clinton youths shake their heads, while their more mature co-supporters wander off visibly bemused at the proceedings.

In the quickly emptying room, four of the Obama girls organising the team – all 18-21, all plastered in Obama stickers, badges and t-shirts – are doing that dance that only young women can do: shrieking with joy, holding each other by the forearms, and pogoing up and down. They’re the girls on the evening news who just got record-breaking exam results. It’s exactly the same image, except what’s got them so excited this time is the state-wide results coming in on mobile phones; with 85% of precincts reporting at that stage, Obama is seven points ahead of his rivals.

Julie from the co-operative bounds across the room looking pleased with her evening’s work: “I get to be a delegate! I’m going to Des Moines for the party – I was nominated as the Kucinich person from the Edwards camp!”

The Clinton organisers are deflated – and pretty surprised at the scale of their defeat.

As the tables are realigned, and the room returned to placid normality, Susanna Peters reappears. She was for Clinton, but doesn’t look unhappy.

“There’s one thing I wanted to say to you before, but got distracted. It’s that we can do all this…” she gestures at the room, the dust settling on three hours of organised chaos. “We can do all this, but the important thing is that everyone leaves peacefully at the end.”

It was touch-and-go for a while there in the middle, but she’s absolutely right.

“This whole place goes a bit crazy around caucus time. I love it, because you get to see all these normally quiet, placid midwesterners get more and more heated as the evening goes on.”

2 hours and 51 minutes to go!!

As the vital hour approaches, the clamour of candidates hoping that Iowa will kick-start their push for the White House has reached new levels of intensity. In Iowa City, or ‘Berkeley on the prairie’ as a local politics professor describes it to me, the final two days before the caucus have witnessed a frenetic last-minute rush of Democratic candidates hoping to shore up their votes and sway those still undecided caucus-goers.

Tuesday night was Hillary Clinton, sequestered furtively in the basement of the 14-storey Sheraton Hotel before 2-300 people, and this afternoon (Wednesday) Barack Obama came to the edge-of-town Marriott Hotel for a rally roughly twice that size.

Clinton was assured, fairly serious and undoubtedly spoke with ‘the Presidential voice’ – which isn’t surprising, since she listened to it for eight years. Obama on the other hand banged the drum for hope, change, and other abstract concepts that sound bland on paper, but inspirational when delivered from the mouth of a great orator.

Clinton was making a job application for a high powered executive job (’here are my skills, here’s my experience’), Obama, though clearly exhausted, was delivering an idealistic sermon calling for a better world.

Both rallies were as glitzy and professional as you’d expect from people hoping to be future leaders of the free world. Both used ‘warm-up’ acts to get the crowd fired up – in exactly the same way that TV studio audiences are warmed up by stand-up comedians. Both rallies used Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’ at some point – precisely the kind of catch-all, please-all song that’s just hip enough to not be a Republican anthem. In fact Obama’s youthful team weren’t even trying to feign the sober atmosphere of a traditional political gathering:

“You guys have got a really great show ahead of you”, warm up guy number one (of five) promises us. A really great SHOW. This is politics as entertainment; no-one’s pretending it isn’t.

The most distinguishing aspect of these ’stump speeches’ is not policy – “80% of the Democratic candidates’ platforms are the same”, the same politics professor tells me later – but which former leaders Clinton and Obama choose to invoke as their political ancestors.

For Hillary, unsurprisingly, it’s Bill Bill Bill all the way. She talks about the 1990s like she was already in the White House as President. Her opponents will remind you that First Lady is not an elected position, but job titles don’t matter to people like Dennis, our kind host in Iowa City: “She was virtually Vice President I think, maybe even more powerful than that. I’m voting for Hillary because I want eight more years of her”, he jokes.

Clinton even goes so far as to use the plural pronoun to describe things Slick Willie achieved, like progress on the Northern Ireland peace process. “In fact,” she boasts, “I visited Northern Ireland even more than my husband did.” Errrrm, a lot of people visit, I murmur to myself, it doesn’t mean they single-handedly ended decades of sectarian violence.

It’s clear from Barack Obama’s speech that he’s also plotted his lineage like a professional genealogist: so we get grandstanding quotes and references to Martin Luther King and JFK in the first twenty minutes – and even a slightly cheeky reference to the promise of the young Bill Clinton. I’m going to play the lineage card myself and invoke PJ O’Rourke – if you’re a Democratic caucus-goer later today, do you want age and guile, or youth and innocence?

At 8.30pm earlier tonight (yes, that’s still Wednesday 2 January, do keep up) we finally got a break from the massed ranks of press cameras and high-end crowd management. Waiting for New Mexico governor Bill Richardson to give his last campaign speech in Iowa in a small, homely bar called The Mill, surrounded by ceiling fans, festive lights, and pints of hoppy beer, our ‘warm-up act’ this time was a blues outfit in early middle age. As the crowd chat away to each other, and the band wind up an old bluegrass standard, the harmonica player turns to the family in the booth nearest to the stage and asks: “Have you any idea when he’s due to turn up?”

*it’s a book by PJ O’Rourke. It’s good.

“Only a numbskull thinks he knows things about things he knows nothing about” (Amy Archer, The Hudsucker Proxy)

Here’s the latest polling for Iowa.

But polling schmolling. Marlene the clinical scientist from the Hillary Clinton rally last night seemed to be for Clinton – she clapped along in all the right places, wore the Clinton For President stickers, but admitted afterwards that she was still undecided.

“I’m going to check out Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Mitt Romney when they’re in town tomorrow (i.e. today). I’ve still got 48 hours to decide and I want to be absolutely sure.”

Another thing that will heavily compromise the polling in this part of Iowa is that we’re in a university town. Obama’s surge has been attributed to his ability to galvanise the youth vote. But the youth vote ain’t here – the campus is a frozen wasteland. Iowa City’s students are at home – mostly in Illinois – for the holidays, and any promises they may have made to come back to ’school’ (university) three weeks early in order to caucus for Obama is going to be severely tempered by the ludicrously cold temperatures. It’s only 4 degrees. Farenheit. Last night the bogeys were freezing in my nose.

Here, by the way, is the story of how we got from Chicago to Iowa, with our new best friends Jess and Mark – written up for the UK’s leading political weekly, the New Statesman. More on Hillary coming soon. Right now we have an appointment with Mr Obama.

The only certainty that existed during this autumn’s phoney war was Hillary Clinton had the Democrat race sewn up: everyone felt that her experience in the Senate (and the White House), and her connections, and money, would be just too much for Barack Obama and John Edwards. Even that certainty has fallen now. For both parties, the first two elections, in Iowa on 3 January, and New Hampshire on 8 January, could be decisive.

Here are the front-runners in Iowa, with latest polling numbers from here:

Clinton 31%
Obama 27%
Edwards 22%
(the field)

Huckabee 28%
Romney 27%
McCain 14%
(the field, including national Republican poll-leader Rudy Giuliani!)

For Republicans and Democrats, an ideal world would see them with a clear favourite candidate from the outset, for whom primary elections were a mere administrative formality. This candidate would be experienced, youthful, strong, warm, have clear-cut views on abortion and gun control that manage to alienate no-one, have the public support of both Oprah and Chuck Norris, as well as being a decorated Vietnam war hero. The primary process would then just be one long, glorious, party-unifying coronation of this unlikely super-candidate.

But even with this election’s ludicrously intense primary calendar – front-loaded to the point that it almost topples over on itself – the race might remain so tight that both parties will still be choosing their candidate after 5 February’s 24-state voting jamboree, Super Tuesday.

Keep the crown on ice, and don’t make any bets on a winner yet.