TRANSITIONS: Ready for our close-up

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Republican political consultant Mike Murphy was on to us in Time magazine recently, writing that Iowa is reaping a financial windfall with the caucuses every four years.

“Candidates may go to Iowa thinking they are the sharpies, but in truth they are the marks,” he contended. “The canny Iowans lure in all sorts of hopefuls, who find themselves spending millions on television ads, motels, office space, rental cars and catering.”

Shucks, I don’t know about that. The money does come in handy when we need baler twine, but if we were really sharpies, we would be scoring more of an image bump every four years.

Top national politicians are masters of self-promotion, staging every photo op, every visit to a small-town diner, as if the world were their soundstage. They know that if you get off that track, you’re flirting with disaster. Newt Gingrich is more likely to write glowing recommendation letters for his ex-staffers than to ever again speak to a random citizen in Dubuque.

We, on the other hand, are modest Iowans. For us, a day without self-deprecation is like a day without the reassuring scent of a hog confinement facility. So we’re humbly grateful for the attention, and it doesn’t always occur to us to game the system. You know, make sure the right people and places get featured. It’s the difference between your family’s videos and Steven Spielberg’s.

To a great extent, we’re the victims of TV’s thirst for the picturesque. It’s hard for a camera to make much out of a successful multinational insurance operation unless you can get an employee to cry while cutting a claim check – either because they’re feeling so much empathy or because, well, there goes the year-end bonus money.

But hogs convey a sense of place, as they say in the image-making business. So we settle for that kind of coverage, grateful that our swine are shown while squealing with what we assume is happiness, rather than on the way to the slaughterhouse. We want to be known for feeding the world, but only in a cheerful way. We do know that much about branding.

As much as I like pigs and still dream of finding one under the Christmas tree some year, I can’t help thinking that we need to seize more control of the image. Unfortunately, our main turn on stage always comes in January, when we’re not at our best. It’s dark, icy, snowy and cold; any publicist who can make us look good in those conditions could sell time shares in North Korea.

Seeing Iowa in the middle of winter is like that time we saw actress Jamie Lee Curtis in a magazine with no makeup, wearing just her ordinary underwear. Hey, if reality is so great, why is there fantasy?

But there’s plenty of campaign time between now and the caucuses, filled with sweet summer evenings and crisp autumn afternoons. We need to pump that stuff out there. And we need to steer our most impressive citizens in front of the cameras.

The goal should be something loftier than reassuring America that we’re polite and reasonable folks. There’s no money in that, at least not for us. It’s kind of dangerous to keep reminding East Coast people that our unofficial state motto is “Easy Pickings.”

No, what we want to convey is that great people live here, and it’s a great place to run a company.

We need to make America see Iowa as not only quaint mom-and-pop diners but also the home of cutting-edge workplaces with first-rate operating conditions.

So if you see a guy wearing a white T-shirt and bib overalls on his way into a campaign event, try to lure him away before the TV crews can latch on to him. Use a ploy that’s guaranteed to attract Iowans.

“Hey, buddy,” you’ll say. “Want to see my combine?”

Jim Pollock is the managing editor of the Des Moines Business Record. He can be reached by email at jimpollock@bpcdm.com