Republicans begin long road to 2008

By Justin Webb
BBC News, Iowa

Has the Massachusetts Governor set his sights on the presidency?

As the Republican Party begins the task of choosing its candidates for the 2008 presidential election, Justin Webb observes one of the early hopefuls, Mitt Romney, Governor of Massachusetts.

We are in a corridor at a high school in Polk county on the outskirts of Des Moines.

I say the outskirts though so far as I can see Des Moines is all outskirts.

The city centre has one skyscraper: A solid, sensible structure much wider at the bottom than the top.

But apart from that there are very few buildings which go above two storeys; there is no need.

There is space here. This is the flat, rich farming country of American legend: painted barns, rolling fields, emptiness.

The nearest big city is Chicago and that is five hours with your foot down.

I have come to see local Republicans.

Their main purpose at this gathering is to prepare for local elections but they have another role as well - they will become, over the next few months, the first Republicans in the nation to meet their party's presidential candidates.

As with most similar gatherings around the world, the real keenies have a slightly crazy air.

Menacing security

I hear one berating another for "taking liberal positions", but before I have a moment to consider what those positions could be, a pimply youth approaches me.

He is wearing a leather flight jacket and Chinos and he has one of those security man's wiggly wire contraptions coming out of his ear.

"Sir, did you record that conversation?" he asked.

"No", I lied. And off he went.

Oh boy. We are in amateur land here.

Serious security - the kind you get from the secret service when you really are important - is an American art form.

The agents are groomed, polite and utterly menacing.

A secret service agent, if he really thought I was doing something wrong, would have ripped the tape out my recorder with his teeth and swallowed it, before handing it back and insisting that I had a good day.

A serious agent would also have known, of course, that openly recording a conversation in a public place is perfectly legal - even in these challenging times.

But, I am not complaining. Far from it.

These next few months are a calm before the storm.

A brief interlude of accessibility, which will soon disappear in a haze of press buses and photo ops.

'First lady'

The woman I was talking to, and recording as well so that I could remember afterwards what she said, is Ann Romney.

Mitt Romney has been Governor of Massachusetts since 2003

She appeared genuinely amazed that the BBC had travelled all this way to see her but she might, in two-and-a-half years, become one of the most recognisable women in the world: America's First Lady.

Ann Romney is a statuesque blonde whose dad, she was telling me, emigrated to America from a village near Maesteg in south Wales.

He came here looking for a better life and his daughter has unquestionably found it.

She is the wife of Mitt Romney the Republican governor of Massachusetts.

But today he is governing nothing, at least not here in Iowa.

This hugely successful multimillionaire businessman turned politician: tanned skin, suspiciously dark hair, very sharp suit arrived unannounced in a modest saloon car, spent some time being polite to the Republican ladies selling coffee for 25 cents a cup (that is about 15 pence).

There is a lot of fuss with dollar bills because, of course, Mr Romney does not normally deal in small change.

That would have been a ghastly blunder, akin to jumping into bed before even flirting, which in Iowa is something only farm animals do.

Then having completed that transaction he slips into the back of the school theatre and pretends to be fascinated by a discussion of whether Polk county Republicans' candidate for school board could, under standing orders, be adopted without formal card vote etc etc.

In the end proceedings were interrupted and Mr Romney was called to the podium where he talked about his wife ("the boss" - ha, ha), his five children and his support for local politicians in their fights with the Democrats.

Gentle campaigning

He did not, of course, mention the presidency.

That would have been a ghastly blunder, akin to jumping into bed before even flirting, which in Iowa is something only farm animals do.

The audience stood and clapped and at the end many shook his hand.

It was all very warm and gentle and wholesome: a fitting way to begin the selection of a presidential candidate in a nation which, for all its meretricious airs, has a simple homespun gentility at its core.

Afterwards Mr Romney sat and ate a sandwich with the two local reporters who had bothered to attend the event.

He is going to eat a lot of sandwiches with a lot of locals over the next two years and so are the other candidates, both Republican and Democrat.

The American politics we see on the television is all stretch limos and balloons and fake smiles.

But it still has a heart and the heart beats here in Iowa, where the Republican ladies sell cheap coffee and a man who would rule the world must drink that coffee - and wait his turn.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 18 March, 2006, at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.