Hillary is counting on Iowa's sense of pride and fairness to help her win the state. Apparently she feels by drawing a comparison between Iowa and Mississippi in terms of the fact that neither has elected a woman governor, senator, or congressperson due to cautiousness is a way to get voters in her corner.
Speaking to everyone's favorite egalitarian Iowa gadfly, David Yepsen, she said:
"I was shocked when I learned Iowa and Mississippi have never elected a woman governor, senator or member of Congress. There has got to be something at work here," she said, theorizing it may be the risk-averse nature of a state built around agriculture.
"I think not only do I have to bring people to me, I have to maybe reassure people here maybe more than I do in New Hampshire, which has had a woman governor," she said."
I think Iowa poses a special burden, or a special obstacle to me because when you look at the numbers, how can Iowa be ranked with Mississippi? That's not what I see. That's not the quality. That's not the communitarianism, that's not the openness I see in Iowa."
"As well as I do, I still have to go over a much higher hurdle in Iowa than anybody else," Clinton said. (Obama may quarrel with that. Iowa's black population is only 2.1 percent.)
And she may have it easier than other women who have run for office in Iowa. Her target audience is 175,000 people who may turn out for a Democratic caucus, and those folks are a lot more female and liberal than Iowa's general-election electorate.
Of course, it is also true that the US has never elected a woman president and I'm not sure that is due to the "risk-averse" voters in Iowa.
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