DUBUQUE, Iowa _ A consistent theme animated Iowa voters as former Vice President Joe Biden brought his newly announced presidential campaign to the state _ practicality, not passion.
Many said they held a place in their hearts for one or another of Biden's rivals, but, for now, had chosen to suppress those feelings, in part out of concern that the rest of the country won't share them.
"I like Elizabeth Warren's policies, I just don't think she can get elected," Greg Reed, a 72-year-old retired high school principal, said as he waited for Biden to appear at a Cedar Rapids auditorium. "I believe Biden can win. That's what I'm interested in. Beating Trump."
In conversation after conversation, voters made similar comments, talking of worries that the electorate is too sexist to elect a woman, too prejudiced to send another person of color to the White House, too cautious to embrace the sweeping economic plans of the party's star progressives.
"I'm old enough to tell you what it was like when (Sen. George) McGovern ran," said Caroline Koppes, 71, of Dubuque. "We thought we were so great when we helped him get the nomination. McGovern won one state," she said, referring to the Democrats' 1972 landslide loss to President Richard Nixon.
Now, desperate to extract Trump, "I will take the safest course," she said.
To her _ as to many _ that's Biden.
Iowa, which holds the first contest of the primary season, has twice before chewed up Biden in failed presidential bids that exposed his shortcomings as a campaigner, fundraiser and organizer. But that was water under the bridge for many voters who came out to see the former vice president, known fondly as "Uncle Joe" to many Iowans nostalgic for the Obama administration.
Several polls have shown Biden, who already led the pack, getting a significant boost after his announcement last week that he is, indeed, running. The poll numbers reflect a Democratic electorate that suspects he is uniquely positioned to defeat Trump.
The risk for Biden is that support rooted more in calculation than fervor could prove fleeting should he start to project anything other than a clear sense of safe electability.
In his initial appearances here, Biden strained to show he is uniquely qualified to deliver. There was none of his signature off-topic meandering at the podium, none of his perilously freewheeling conversations with reporters, no infringement on anyone's personal space. The candidate stayed uncharacteristically on script.
Not everything worked. A muted performance at his kickoff event in Cedar Rapids on Tuesday hardly got the crowd raising the roof. The campaign's efforts to limit interactions with the media had the feel of Hillary Clinton's overly cautious and controlling operation. At a planned stop at an ice cream shop to which only a handful of reporters were invited, Biden avoided addressing policy questions, even as the policy debate among the candidates has already been raging for months.
Later that night in Dubuque, however, one of those places that swung heavily from supporting Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016, the former vice president hit his stride.
"Everybody knows who Donald Trump is," he said toward the end of a stump speech that excoriated the president for his defense of white supremacists, attacks on universal health care and tax policies that Biden warned are eviscerating the middle class. "We've got to know who we are."
Even as Biden benefits from nostalgia among many Iowa Democrats for the Obama days and their sense that he could restore that era, his campaign has a very different feel than Obama's did. It is focused less on highlighting diversity and expanding the political map for Democrats than on winning back white, working-class voters in the "blue wall" states in the industrial Midwest and mid-Atlantic. The promise to bring back a quality of life from decades past has echoes of Trump's pitch to voters, but with a more optimistic tinge.
"If we just get up and remember who in God's name we are, and change this administration, I am optimistic we are better positioned than any country in the world to own the 21st century," he said.
Biden fed off the crowd's enthusiasm. He ripped into the ballooning federal deficit that he warned will ultimately lead Republicans to try to cut Social Security.
"This is going to be the battle of our lives," he said. "If I am president, it will not happen."
He talked about how the government could pay the tuition for every qualified person wanting to attend community college by closing corporate tax loopholes. And he went on at length, with affirmation from the crowd of many hundreds, chastising corporations for exploiting the working class.
The locale and event were perfect for illustrating Biden's contention that he can win back some of the white, working-class voters who left the Democrats for Trump in the last election, some of whom were on hand.
"He would be the only Democrat I would vote for; no one else is even close," said Tracy Steinhoff, a 46-year-old nurse at the Dubuque event who only days before had traveled three hours to Wisconsin to participate in a Trump rally.
"Biden understands what people are going through."
