Cedar Rapids, Iowa — If you look carefully, beyond the price of yellow soybeans at the Chicago Board of Trade, the high school wrestling results and the pork producers' effort to win a congressional ban on packers owning stockyards, you might see the contours of the next presidential election beginning to take form.
The Iowa caucuses are still two years away, and there are no signs of rallies or even country coffees. The potential candidates make short, unobtrusive visits former Vice President Al Gore and Sens. John Edwards of North Carolina, John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut have stopped by but the campaign is being undertaken mostly by stealth right now, and mostly over the telephone.
But though the next presidential election was likely shaped by the terrorist attacks of September, two events in January already have altered the way the campaign will be conducted.
The first event is the adoption of a new calendar for selecting the Democratic nominee, which moves the Iowa caucuses up to Jan. 19, a month earlier than they were in 1984 and on the very day the nation is supposed to be pausing to reflect on the lessons of Martin Luther King Jr. a confluence the Democrats may find difficult to explain when the time finally arrives. The second event is the beginning of the Enron affair.
The accelerated calendar for selecting a Democratic nominee means there will be less than three weeks of campaigning between the Rose Bowl and Caucus Night. The effects of calendar changes are notoriously difficult to predict, but some are almost certain. It's likely that the next election will have even less personal campaigning than previous elections and even more emphasis on big money and big media, which means that the time-honored rituals of candidate visits to Ottumwa and Keokuk, where there aren't many campaign dollars but a surfeit of common sense, are in jeopardy.
But here's a factor that has been overlooked thus far: The possibility that the entire campaign may be over by Feb. 3 could have a big effect on the Democratic field. The Senate term of John Edwards, one of the party's most appealing new personalities, is up in 2004. Under the old rules, he would have had to choose whether to seek the presidency or run for re-election. Under this schedule, the entire Democratic campaign could be completed by the middle of the first week of February, which is when North Carolina traditionally requires Senate candidates to register for the ballot. Edwards can now take his chances in the presidential sweepstakes without relinquishing his chance to run for a second term.
No one knows whether the Enron scandal will become a political scandal, but it's almost certain that it will become a political factor. Enron gave $113,800 to George W. Bush's presidential campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The company's donations to all potential Democratic presidential candidates since 1993 was a total of $9,000 and a total of $0 since 1998.
Even if there is no scandal typing Enron and its former chief, Kenneth Lay, with the president and his administration, Democrats will use the episode to portray Bush and the Republicans as the allies not only of big corporations, but also of big corporate leaders who preserved their financial security while their workers were losing theirs.
"The scandal reminds people that Republicans look out for big business and gives the Democrats an opportunity to argue they are for the little guy," said Douglas Hattaway, a Democratic consultant who was the national spokesman for the Gore campaign in 2000. "There is a Democratic danger in overplaying this, so it is a very tricky thing to do. The best way to go about it is to focus on the people who lost their pensions while the management was cashing in. You couldn't be closer to the Bush administration than the Enron management is."
In recent days, moreover, Democrats have begun to see another twist to the Enron conundrum: Though it may turn out that the administration didn't provide assistance to Enron when it was in steep decline, it may be that the government should have but couldn't couldn't intervene, that is, because the ties between the company and top officials were so intimate that, out of fear of being charged with responding to big donors, they couldn't do what they should have done.
One of the rules of the road to the presidency in recent years is that winning candidates run against Washington; since 1976, every successful candidate except for the first President Bush has run against the way politics is practiced in the capital. A field of Democratic contenders who have a Washington office one of whom, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, may still be Senate majority leader, and another, Richard Gephardt of Missouri, may then be House speaker is peculiarly ill-positioned to run against Washington.
But the Enron scandal may present them with an opening: to run against the way things are done in Washington right now.
David Shribman is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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