'Excuse me, is there a windmill or potato field nearby?'

The troubling aspect of telling people exactly what you think is they usually respond in kind.

Such is the dilemma Iowa faces thanks to the caucuses. Not just the national, but the world media has descended upon our state to see who our Democrats will pick to run for president against George W. Bush.

Though New York and Washington and Atlanta and Los Angeles and London journalists are fairly good at maintaining their objectivity when reporting the presidential race, we also can read between the lines and get a sense of what people from far-flung places think of our state.

It's an interesting array of images.

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Consider this report from a Des Moines colleague: When one national television chain rolled into town, they asked if there was a windmill nearby that they could report in front of. When told no, they asked if there was a cow.

Perhaps the most notorious image is the New York Times editorial that described Iowa as a "quaint" state in arguing that we shouldn't play such a big role nominating the president.

Or there's this snippet from a New York Times op-ed, noting "... the great distances of flat highways that stretch between campaign stops." Mmm ... evocative.

Then there's political pundit Charles E. Cook Jr., who noted in an op-ed defending Iowa's status as first-in-the nation, "Although some of these people lack the sophistication of the East or West Coast, they often display common sense and maybe have a hypocrisy meter that is as sensitive as anywhere else."

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"Wait, I don't care what those guys think of us," you may say.

Don't lie. It's unbefitting of an Iowan to lie.

You do care.

"... social approval and disapproval affect virtually everyone's feelings about themselves, even those individuals who steadfastly and adamantly claim that their feelings about themselves are not affected by other people's evaluations," ac-cording to a Wake Forest University study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin's most recent issue.

Added Mark Leary, lead-author of the study, "People underestimate the degree to which they are influenced by others. It's hard to know why, but part of it may be the American ideal of marching to your own drummer. We grow up thinking we shouldn't be affected by what others think."

Or in Iowa's case, where 10 different candidates have been trying to get us to like them for the past year, maybe too many of us have seen social approval taken to the extreme and can't imagine ourselves remotely being like that.

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Among the problems with the media imagery is that we hail many of those same items as state icons. We're proud of our cornfields and windmills, but we don't exactly like to be associated with them.

Existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in "Being and Nothingness" (take that for sophistication, Charles E. Cook Jr.,!) that the psychological problem of another looking at us is that we lose control of the ability to define ourselves.

Indeed, we don't mind preserving windmills to recognize our heritage, but once a journalist gives a report in front of that icon, others presume it's not our past but our present. Though most Iowans have little to do with the farm anymore, the image makes us farmers - and raises all of the uncomfortable stereotypes that may come with such a label.

At least no national reporter has asked if there's a potato field nearby.

(originally published Jan. 18, 2004)