DES MOINES ? Teresa Heinz Kerry was speaking the simple truth when she remarked here the other day, “Iowa gets better as you meet more and more of its people.”

The wife of Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was addressing about 300 women interested in Kerry’s candidacy in next Monday’s Iowa caucuses, and the remark could have been categorized as pandering. But the famously outspoken woman philanthropist was giving voice to a deeper personal conviction.

She had not seen the caucus process before, she said, adding — in a tone that bordered on resignation — that it had been hard for her to accept that so many of those she met “might not caucus for my husband. You might go away with fear and disappointment that they might be right” in choosing to support someone else, she said. “But you leave with hope.”

Why? “Because of the dignity with which they treat the process,” Heinz Kerry said. “What is most lethal in our country now is the cynicism” toward politics and politicians that she said she finds almost everywhere. That cynicism is blessedly absent among the caucus-goers in Iowa.

True, they are a self-selected, small sample of the population. In 2000, only 61,000 attended the Democratic caucuses. Some expect that number to double this year, but even if it does, it would still be less than a quarter of the 572,000 registered Democrats in Iowa.

Coming back to Iowa after a long absence, I was struck, as I have been before, by the extraordinarily conscientious way that those few souls approach what they see as their serious responsibility in starting the process that leads, a year later, to the inauguration of a president. They sort and weigh personal attributes and policy positions, then do it again, before finally deciding which hopeful they will stand up to support.

I thought about Ivan Weber, a Des Moines lawyer I had met earlier that day. Many of his friends were supporting Howard Dean, he told me, but he had ruled out the former Vermont governor. Why? “It bothers me that he says he is for open government, but he closes up the records of his own administration. I think, too, he’s got that small-state psychology of thinking what works well there will work well everywhere. The country is not like Vermont.”

He had listened to five of the nine candidates in person — some of them more than once. He had a particularly favorable impression of two — Kerry and Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, the man he had come to see again when I met him. Kerry, he said, “has a wonderful background, but somehow, he seems almost too smooth.” And, like Rep. Dick Gephardt, Kerry has been in Washington a long time. “As Edwards says,” Weber soliloquized, more to himself than to me, “if you’ve been in Washington for 20 years, as they have, aren’t you part of the problem?”

Gradually, methodically, he seemed to be talking himself into an Edwards vote.

Of course, others are much more instinctual, even impulsive, in their choices. Sally Troxell, a self-described “super-volunteer” in dozens of civic causes, recalled how she first heard Howard Dean being interviewed on a Sunday morning TV show while cooking bacon in her kitchen. “I heard the voice before I started listening to the words, and I said to myself, ‘This guy sounds real.’ Then I started listening to what he was saying, and I said, ‘holy moley, he is for real.’ And I didn’t even agree with him — he was talking about guns, and I want to get rid of them. But he explained his position that each state should decide for itself, and he didn’t try to hide it.”

Later, in a face-to-face conversation, she pressed Dean to agree that corporations should treat stock options as expenses on their books, and once again, he differed with her, explaining that he had learned that options were vital for start-up ventures in such places as Silicon Valley. It was another “holy moley” moment.

“I haven’t felt this way about a candidate or a cause in 35 years,” Troxell exclaimed.

Thirty-five years? I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Since SDS,” referring to the Students for a Democratic Society, the New Left campus organization of the 1960s.

Teresa Heinz Kerry is right. These people are so straightforward, so uncynical, they are irresistible. It’s a great place to start the process.

David Broder is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.