Only a father would do this: In 1988, mine carried a column I had written on the Iowa Caucuses in his pocket. It had been unfolded and refolded so many times that the creases bore traces of farmer’s dirt. “My daughter wrote this,” he’d say to friends who humored him by reading it. “Did you happen to see her on TV?”

He made it sound as if someone from the national media had picked me for an interview, as if among all the journalists in Iowa, I had the most unique perspective on this comedy in the cornfield that we call the Iowa caucuses. In fact, I had been caught on tape by a TV camera panning a barn during a candidate meet-and-greet session I was covering.

I told him that, but he dismissed it with his wave of his arms. That wasn’t how he wanted the folks around Northwest Missouri to see me, as just another face in the crowd. He wanted them to think his kid was somebody really important.

And what went on in that barn that day, and in thousands of caucus events this year and before, was what the candidates wanted Americans to see. But those wholesome images of presidential aspirants breaking bread with ordinary Iowans aren’t necessarily all that wholesome.

This has been bugging me since 1988. Jesse Jackson was campaigning in Iowa and his people called the Democratic Party’s people hoping they can locate a large farm family with whom he could share breakfast. Bundling family values with concern for agriculture into one nice package, the footage would provide some nice images for the media horde following him around.

Jackson’s people were particular: They wanted to locate a farm family with lots of kids, a feat in this 2.5-children-per-household world. They had to be registered Democrats. Finally, they found a family meeting the criteria, but what Americans saw on TV and in newspapers wasn’t what they would have seen if they could actually have peeked behind the curtains of that rural Iowa farmhouse.

The mother and father were divorced, dysfunctionally so. They spoke only through neutral third parties. Even then communication was dicey, with the messenger often worrying that the verbal abuse might turn physical. The dad, the upstanding farmer with whom Jackson was having breakfast, hadn’t paid a dime of child support since the divorce two years before. The mom had trouble scraping up enough cash to hire an attorney to press the matter in court.

I was involved not as a reporter but as a facilitator. It was my job to get the children there because my friend, their mother, was having nothing to do with it. It would have been easier to buy Jesse Helms as a Jackson supporter, she said, than the man who had been her husband.

But whether the man was a card-carrying Jackson supporter didn’t matter to his people, nor was it important to them that as a father, the guy was signiciantly less than ideal. Farm family. Nice image. On to the next photo-op. Iowa’s a stage.