An undated Hotel Fort Des Moines postcard. (Ebay)
If the Hotel Fort Des Moines could talk, says its website, it would "tell us how Richard Nixon tromped though on his way to a landslide victory in 1972, or "how candidate Jack Kennedy lighted through during his 1960 campaign that launched America's Camelot." It might even tell us how ABC News senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper snagged Mrs. Tapper.
"I met a gorgeous, brilliant woman at the Hotel Fort Des Moines the night of the 2004 Iowa Caucuses," Tapper wrote on Twitter last year. "Married her in '06."
Mitt Romney and his campaign are scheduled to watch caucus results at the historic hotel on Tuesday night--just like former caucus winners George H.W. Bush (1980) Walter Mondale (1984), Bob Dole (1988, 1996), Al Gore (2000) and John Kerry (2004) all did. But don't expect a swarm of reporters. The hotel--specifically its bar--seems to have fallen out of favor with the political media that invades Iowa every four years.
"Previous gathering spots like the Savery Hotel bar and the lounge at Hotel Fort Des Moines have lost their luster or closed altogether," the New York Times' Mark Leibovitch declared in a recent profile of the 2012 cycle's watering hole of choice: the City Center Lounge at the Marriott in downtown Des Moines, which opened after renovations last week.
"By 11:30 p.m., the lobby bar was hopping with about 100 people, nearly all of them journalists, consultants, political tourists or various hangers-on, according to an imprecise census taken by a reporter," Leibovitch wrote on Friday.
New York magazine's Gabe Sherman published a recent dispatch from the Marriott's bar:
The lobby bar in the downtown Des Moines Marriott is like a communal watering hole where roving packs of reporters, political hacks, and even candidates assemble nightly to drain drinks and exchange political gossip. New arrivals can cause heads to turn, like when [New York Times executive editor] Jill Abramson and [columnist] Maureen Dowd entered the bar around 7:30 p.m. on New Year's Eve before hosting a dinner for New York Times staffers. A few moments later, Mitt Romney sparked chatter when he hustled by the front desk pulling his own roller bag, looking like the Bain consultant road warrior he once was.
Vanity Fair's Juli Weiner did, too:
The nexus of all media activity in the Iowa capital, where the all-important presidential caucus will take place on January 3, is the downstairs bar at the downtown Marriott. It's a spacious establishment whose round shape and atmosphere of shamelessness make it ideal for seeing whether anyone more important or attractive is behind the person you're talking to.
Early in the evening, Mitt Romney, known teetotaler, towed his own wheelie bag past the bar and into the bowels of the hotel. Callista Gingrich had stopped by earlier with a group of friends. ... [Abramson] milled around the lobby with a group that included New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Politico's Mike Allen, an omniscient, human-shaped specter who haunts the nation's e-mail inboxes in the early morning hours, breezed by with earthly colleague Jonathan Martin.
Weiner even surveyed the damage the next day:
Feeling a little like we'd caught sight of ourselves in a mirror after sleeping in our makeup, this morning we saw the downtown Marriott bar in the light of day. It was barren yet strangely inviting.
So what happened to the formerly formidable lounge-scene at Hotel Fort Des Moines?
No one picked up at the hotel bar when Yahoo News called on Tuesday. (The bar doesn't open until 4 p.m. local time, according to the website.) But according to one local Des Moines reporter, a smaller media presence in Iowa this cycle, and a smattering of campaign events all over the state, are to blame.
"The media presence four years ago was enormous compared to this time, and many of those covering the caucuses have had to hit events outside Des Moines," Lee Rood, an investigative reporter at the Des Moines Register, wrote in an email to Yahoo News. "Last time, there were a lot more media who spent more time in Des Moines."
She added: "I wasn't out over the weekend, but my understanding was there were caucus people all over downtown last night, including the new Marriott bar."
And tonight, there are sure to be plenty more, as candidates fan out to area hotels to await caucus results. But don't expect Romney to hit the lounge at the Hotel Fort Des Moines, even if he alights there to take in results. According to the Times, Romney and his wife, "who do not drink alcohol, darted past the scene" at the Marriott bar on Dec. 30 "and headed up to their room on the 30th floor."
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