Scream 2

The Clinton and Obama campaigns occupy neighboring offices in the same mixed-use building in downtown Iowa City. Hillary's office windows are bricked over with official Clinton '08 placards; Obama's office windows are a pastiche of different campaign images and crude hand-painted signs. Inside Obama, you see a jumble of clipboards, college kids hanging out shooting the breeze, cult-of-personality images of Barack all over the place, and a few wise men in the back on a conference call. It's difficult to say where the cutoff between staffer and volunteer falls, because the official greeter is a college kid from Des Moines, who doesn't seem to know much, and seems desperate to be liked. On the walls, more contributor art, including twee finger paintings of the Obama logo done by some preschoolers shepherded into the office for a photo op.

Hillary's office is spartan and efficient. No greeter, but you can help yourself to the water cooler, or any of the campaign paraphernalia, buttons, signs, posters, arrayed in the vestibule. Four full-time staffers work down a short corridor in offices adorned with maps and easel-pad sheets with columns of numbers: these are the 57 precincts within Johnson County, with approximate vote targets. The staffers aren't desperate to get me on board. If anything, they want to know what I can do for them. This is appealing. The Clintonites aren't bothering much with the campus, and they shouldn't. College kids turn out in small numbers to vote in regular primaries; it's even less likely that they'll take 3 hours out of a weekday night in the middle of exams in the January cold to participate for no money in an arcane political ritual that subjects them to nonstop hectoring from their elders. Hillary instead is doing community outreach to core constituent groups, and has outflanked Obama in Iowa City's small applied housing neighborhoods, where she's throwing a block party tomorrow night. The Obama team's proudest accomplishment to date, it seems, is finding sister colleges in neighboring Illinois for every college in Iowa. Obama volunteers from Obama's homestate will thus have places to stay when they arrive a few days before caucuses, barely briefed on the townships they're entering, iffy on the decisive issues, to recapitulate the p.r. disaster of Dean's Perfect Storm.

These two small offices may or may not be indicative of their respective campaigns on the statewide and national levels, but if they are, Obama is toast. The Clintonites have a war room, from which to stage a campaign. The Barackers have a safe space where people of the right conscience can come and bask in the aura of the leader.