- "The scrambled eggs have grown cold. So, perhaps, has the American experiment."
- "I have been to places. Table 17 is now among them."
By Sam Turge | Senior Political Correspondent-at-Large
HYATT REGENCY DES MOINES — DAY FOUR
The scrambled eggs have grown cold. So, perhaps, has the American experiment.
I am sitting at Table 17 of the Mezzanine Grille & Grill, a restaurant that occupies the spiritual center of the Hyatt Regency Des Moines, Iowa — a building that functions, if I am being precise in the way only a man of my experience can be, as a kind of cathedral. If cathedrals had a Starbucks. And a TGI Friday's within walking distance. And a concierge named Doug who has started greeting me by name, which I take as a sign of either respect or concern.
I have not left this building in four days.
I want you to sit with that sentence.
Four days.
Outside, Vice President J.D. Vance is making his first trip to the early caucus state. Campaign staffers are pressing flesh and distributing yard signs and making the kinds of promises that evaporate like morning dew on a campaign bus windshield. History — the grinding, implacable machinery of it — is being made somewhere beyond the automatic sliding doors of this lobby, in that flat, earnest, wind-scoured place that is Iowa.
I don't need to go there. The story comes to me.
This morning, from Table 17, I observed three campaign staffers at the booth nearest the decorative waterfall. They were young — they are always young now, these operatives, a fact I find both alarming and personally insulting — and they were eating the same continental breakfast the hotel provides at a flat rate of $23.99 per person, eggs and sausage and a waffle iron that asks more of you than some editors I have known. The staffers spoke in hushed tones. They glanced at their phones. One of them appeared to be from Ohio. I couldn't be certain.
At approximately 9:47 a.m., a pollster I recognized from CNN's green room in 2019 entered the restaurant. He sat three tables away. For a moment — a long, electric, journalistically significant moment — our eyes almost met. He looked up. I inclined my head in the manner of a correspondent acknowledging a fellow traveler in a foreign land, the kind of nod that says: *We are both here. We are both watching.* He looked at the menu. He ordered the French toast.
I did not approach him. The great reporters know when not to move.
From my window, the parking lot is visible. A satellite truck from a regional affiliate has been parked in the same spot since yesterday. I have been monitoring it. It has not moved either. We are, in our way, colleagues.
The waitstaff here know my order now. I take this as a professional compliment and also as evidence that I have been tipping correctly, which I have — generously, pointedly, in the manner of a man who understands that the mezzanine restaurant is not a rest stop but a forward operating base. Carmen brings the coffee without being asked. She calls me "hon." I believe she respects the work.
This morning, Carmen set down my second cup and it caught the edge of a press credential lanyard I had draped across the table — my sixth lanyard this trip, each one a small flag planted in the soil of American political history — and the coffee tipped, spilling across the laminate surface in a thin, dark arc.
I watched it spread.
You know what that is? I'll tell you what that is. That is the story of this country right now. Two generations of voters and the gulf between them, spreading outward from a single inciting event, staining everything it touches, impossible to fully clean up even with the paper napkins they leave in the little holder next to the sweetener packets. As I wrote in my 2020 column on the Wisconsin recall election — and I'm going to quote myself here because the observation has only deepened — *"The center, historically, has always been a table that someone jostled."* I stand by it. I stand by it more than ever, at this table, on this morning, with Carmen already bringing a fresh napkin and asking if I want more orange juice.
I have been in difficult places. I covered the 2012 DNC pre-event logistics briefing from a Marriott Courtyard in Charlotte. I was in a Hampton Inn in Reno when the Nevada caucus results came in — I was on hold with the campaign press office for forty minutes, which is a kind of suffering. I filed from a Comfort Suites in Concord, New Hampshire at 2 a.m. on a night when my internet connection was so poor that the piece didn't upload for three hours, and if that isn't a form of frontline reporting I don't know what is.
Cronkite stood in Hue City after Tet and told America the truth. Hersh broke My Lai with nothing but a phone and a reporter's nerve. Bernstein and Woodward built Watergate paragraph by paragraph from sources who met in parking garages.
I have a parking lot view and sources who haven't responded to my texts.
The work endures.
As I wrote in this space last fall — and again, I return to my own record because it holds up — *"Democracy is a hotel you check into but can never fully check out of, no matter what the continental breakfast situation is."* The editors cut that line. I am reinstating it now. You're welcome, history.
The lobby television has been tuned to CNN since my arrival. The chyrons scroll. The faces I have sat across from in green rooms and conference calls fill the screen, offering takes, offering frameworks, offering the kind of confident uncertainty that is the lingua franca of cable news at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday. I watch them the way a veteran watches a young unit head into terrain he has already mapped.
Outside, Iowa is happening.
In here, America is happening too — in the shuffle of a bellhop cart, in the negotiations between the self-serve waffle station and a man in a "Iowa Strong" fleece, in the particular fluorescent silence of a hotel mezzanine on a weekday morning when the nation's future is being horse-traded somewhere in a school gymnasium seventeen minutes from where I sit.
I do not need to go to the gymnasium.
I have table 17.
The eggs are cold. The coffee is fresh. The republic teeters, as it always has, on the edge of something — something enormous and clarifying and just out of frame.
I'll be here when it tips.
From the front lines, this is Turge.
Sam Turge is IRREVERENT Magazine's Senior Political Correspondent-at-Large. He has filed from 34 states, 11 hotel chains, and one houseboat in Baton Rouge that he prefers not to discuss. He is currently on Day Four in Des Moines. He plans to check out on Friday, weather permitting.
[Editor's note: Sam's press credentials for this event were general-admission media passes. He attended zero official events. He did speak briefly with a man outside the elevator whom he believed to be a senator. It was the hotel's night manager. This is why I'm here. — Ed.]