The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

We are talking now about the front porches where neighbors in small towns ebb and flow in the summer twilight, murmuring their joys, worries and loves.

We are talking about young couples who want to marry in the weathered country churches built by their great-grandfathers a century ago -- and about their parents who want to be buried there, where the wind whispers always.

We are talking about children and ponies on the rise of the hill, going nowhere and everywhere, beckoned by cumulus crags and a horizon forever.

We are talking about kids who want to play fullback with the Tigers or the Bulldogs, just like their uncles did in 1953 when they won the conference.

We are talking about people who want to give birth and grow and love and laugh and die, bonded and sustained by the soil, which is the oldest way of life Americans know.

The farm economic crisis has become a rural crisis, and that has become a cultural crisis unique in our history. It is now beyond bank loans and Government subsidies. It is in people's hearts.

Prosperous neighbors feel guilty. Bankrupt neighbors feel ashamed. Farmers who can afford new machines won't buy them, lest they embarrass friends. Machinery dealers go broke. Bankers anguish and hesitate -- and fail.

The ugly scourge of old was drought and dust storms that tore the earth apart. And it is again this summer in the South. Yet that is temporary. The more menacing scourge is verdant bounty as far as the eye can see in the nation's midsection and diminishing markets for the rich harvests. Dan Rather and his combat jacket have long ago left the hogpens to report on other worldly terrors, like the wedding of Andy and Fergie. Hollywood's Jessica Lange and Country are wilted memories. Farm foreclosures are too common to rate as pop drama any longer.

The presidential hopefuls are arriving. They gorge on catastrophe. There is everybody to blame and no one responsible. Babbitt, Biden, Dole, Baker, Kemp, Bradley, Hart. They come like pallbearers in dark suits and white shirts and furrowed brows. It is plain that Iowa, uniquely distressed this summer because of its rural character (i.e., farms linked to small towns), will be the bloody ground on which the 1988 presidential nominations will be shaped.

What to do? Iowa has written off Ronald Reagan, turned away from almost everybody else in Washington. "We're doing it ourselves," insists Governor Terry Branstad. "We've gone beyond grieving," says Richard Krumme, editor of Des Moines's Successful Farming magazine. "There's not one solution, there are 100,000 solutions." Iowa farmers are thinking about raising flowers, birdseed, llamas, snails and a few other items they never saw or tasted before. They pledge to work in factories, should anybody send one their way, better than the people in New Jersey and California. Adversity has fired them up again.

The critical time is here. Can something that is old and beautiful and basic be saved by melding it with a lot that is new and brassy and unproven? The sociologists, historians and anthropologists are lined up, looking over the shoulders of the politicians, because something terribly important in American history is happening, and nobody knows how it is going to come out.