Jefferson Jackson Dinner could be game-changer for Democrats
DES MOINES, Iowa — The Iowa Democratic Party’s Jefferson Jackson Dinner on Saturday will be a party fundraiser, an organizational test, a media frenzy and an old-fashioned political spectacle.
And if previous JJs are any indication, it could be the scene for presidential history as well.
As a political pageant and historical moment, the JJ probably hit its peak in 2007, when Barack Obama outshined Hillary Clinton and John Edwards just weeks before the 2008 caucuses. But its significance goes back much further than that – back to 1975 and the first truly contested presidential caucuses.
Seven presidential candidates attended the ’75 dinner, and The Des Moines Register organized a straw poll of attendees to gauge their organizational strength.
Jimmy Carter won with 256 votes — about 23% of those cast.
That little poll was thrown together by a newspaper and conducted on an electorate of just 1,094 hardcore activists, but it was reported nationally and helped establish Carter as the Democratic front-runner.
Candidates showed up again in 1979 and 1983, and by 1987 the event was a full-on spectacle.
A Washington Post dispatch from the ’87 JJ describes rival campaign volunteers assembling outside Des Moines’ old Veterans Auditorium at 1:45 a.m. so that they could rush into the hall as soon as the doors opened to begin plastering every available surface with campaign signs.
“I felt I was going to be trampled. The people were pushing and shoving and yanking. For a minute, I thought I was finished,” a Paul Simon volunteer named Beth Deppe told the Post. “It was like being inside a pinball machine.”
In 2003, candidates once again packed the hall with supporters and “papered the house” with posters. Howard Dean, who was leading the pack at that point in mid-November, caused a stir by rolling 47 buses through downtown Des Moines — all of them allegedly filled with soldiers in his grass-roots army.
Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi admitted last spring a bit of gamesmanship.
“Yeah, some of those buses were empty,” he allowed, before adding sarcastically, “but no one's ever pulled theater at a JJ dinner before.”
Those sign wars and show-of-strength shenanigans were all prelude, though, to the 2007 JJ.
Obama, then a Senator from Illinois, turned out thousands of supporters on the day of the dinner, held a rally with pop star John Legend and led a march through downtown Des Moines featuring its own drum corps. Inside the auditorium, he was introduced by the Chicago Bulls’ arena announcer and used his speech to draw his sharpest contrasts yet with the front-running Clinton.
Obama adviser David Axelrod likened the JJ to a boxing match.
“Yes, that was the seminal event,” he said last May. “We knew it would be. We knew that we had to make a big stand there.”
Obama’s speech, Axelrod said, was “magnificent” — a judgment that the national political establishment largely shared. It marked the start of Obama’s surge to victory in the caucuses and beyond.
“Everyone in the hall knew that this was a big moment,” Axelrod said. “And from that point on, we had inexorable momentum in Iowa.”