Iowans look for dirt under Giuliani's fingernails

Mr. Giuliani signed autographs like a machine, a reminder of just how famous he is. He traveled with what appeared to be an endless inventory of Sharpies, rotely affixing his name to campaign leaflets, books, T-shirts, signs and menus, even when no one was asking. “Want me to sign something?” he said as he wandered the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines.

His style of campaigning, at least in these rural settings, proved as unconventional as Mr. Giuliani can be. In Iowa, candidates enter a place, shake a few hands, make a speech and take questions. Mr. Giuliani arrived without ceremony or announcement and worked the room, sitting down at table after table and talking at length to the people he met. He dawdled and seemed to make an effort to find something to say to everyone, before leaving with a quick goodbye.

The conversation topics included why he was running for president, Iowa and, inevitably enough, sports. Mr. Giuliani was crestfallen to learn, from a table of schoolchildren, that baseball is not as popular in Iowa as it is in New York. He moved on to ask for an explanation of “how does it break down between Iowa and Iowa State,” as he tried to fathom the legendary rivalry between the two university football teams.

There was no sign of the belligerent side of Mr. Giuliani so familiar to New Yorkers — like the time he called a caller to his radio show “deranged.” He was unfailingly polite as he tried to connect, even ignoring what he might have taken in the Bronx as a spitball, albeit one delivered with a smile.

“Are you missing your tall buildings while you are enjoying our green cornfields here?” asked Mr. Schuler, the farmer who had come 30 miles with his wife.

Nati Harnik / Associated Press Rudolph W. Giuliani after a campaign stop recently at the Wander In Cafe in Carson, Iowa.

Mr. Giuliani laughed. “I called my wife this morning and I said, ‘Judith, I never have seen more corn in my life.’ You know the median, where they put the grass in the middle? There’s a lot of room there to put some more corn in. I don’t know why they haven’t done it.”

He paused. “When do you start the picking and the harvesting? Starts pretty soon, right?”

Silence.

“November,” a woman answered. “End of October, November.”

Mr. Giuliani, who has a summer home in the Hamptons, where locally grown sweet corn is sold at small streetside farm stands, explained that on Long Island, corn is harvested at the end of August.

His invocation of Staten Island for common ground in his conversations with Iowans was perhaps a bit of a stretch. While Staten Island is unlike any of the other four New York boroughs — more open land than high rises — it has been a long time since it was known for its farms.

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Similarly, when the power went out in Cumberland, Mr. Giuliani talked about the blackouts in New York City and boasted how he led the city through those dark hours without there being looting or rioting. “Blackouts were one of my biggest fears as mayor,” he said. “It used to be in the old days when it happened, we would have a riot.”

The two blocks that make up Cumberland, nestled in a valley surrounded by rolling fields of corn and accessible this day only by a dirt road that sent up clouds of dust as Mr. Giuliani arrived in his motorcade, did not seem particularly prone to a riot.

Candidates always seem to be encountering new experiences when they come to Iowa. That might be true for Mr. Giuliani more than most. At the state fair, he went to the stands that sell turkey legs — one of the fair’s more famous offerings, and about as big as a baby’s arm — and ordered first one, and then four.

When someone informed him that the turkey legs were reputed to be the single most fattening thing at the Iowa State Fair — which is saying quite a lot at a fair where people feast on fried Twinkies and fried Oreos — Mr. Giuliani responded that he was only going to eat one, and share the rest with his staff.

But wherever he went, Mr. Giuliani gushed about Iowa and its voters, and marveled at what he described as the “complex political” queries he was encountering.

“Aren’t these questions great?” he said as he got up to leave the diner here. “This is terrific. We could be at the Kennedy School of Government.”

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