Orin Is One. He’s Already Taken the Measure of 12 Presidential Hopefuls

Meet the baby who has met a dozen contenders for the American presidency.

Orin Atlas just turned one, and won’t be eligible to vote in a presidential election until 2040. Yet the infant has had a front-row seat to the pageantry of American democracy.

His parents, Anthony Atlas and Toronto-raised Kate Lacey, spent the summer in Iowa, where a parade of Democratic hopefuls crisscrossed the state in advance of the first-in-the nation caucuses to be held Monday.

On a sunny August day, his mother decided on a lark to attend the opening of a field office for Joe Biden in their temporary home of Iowa City, a college town of 75,000 people. She brought along her baby son.

More than 300 people crowded inside a storefront next to Gumby’s Pizza and Wings in the auspiciously named Kennedy Plaza.

In the crush of people, a handler told the former vice-president, “Joe, there’s a baby. Take a picture with the baby.”

Biden, a father of four and grandfather of five, obliged, the sleeves of his blue dress shirt rolled up to his elbows, tucking his left hand beneath the baby’s bottom while cradling him with the right. Partisans and photographers snapped the image as the baby disinterestedly sucked on his right thumb.

The experience was so much fun, the young couple decided to attend other campaign events.

“I knew Iowa was important in the primaries,” said Lacey. “I didn’t know how intimate the meetings are.”

And, she notes, “Orin is American. Whoever wins this is possibly going to be his next president.”

Politics in the Hawkeye state are a folksy affair, a function of its curious caucus system for deciding which presidential candidates emerge with support in their bid for a party nomination.

Candidates go door to door. They glad-hand on Main Street and pull up next to you on a stool at the local diner. They attend town halls, block parties, campaign breakfasts, neighbourhood meet-and-greets and living-room kaffeeklatsches. They flip striploin steaks grilling at the Polk County Steak Fry. They munch corn dogs at the Iowa State Fair. The Democratic contenders attend a Liberty and Justice Celebration in Des Moines, a combination pep rally and fundraising dinner for the party.

This election cycle, the Des Moines Register newspaper counted more than 3,000 public events attended by candidates for the presidency, including more than 20 Democratic contenders and two Republican rivals to president Donald Trump.

Patrons of Hamburg Inn No. 2, a family-owned diner in Iowa City which opened during the Depression, are invited to take part in a Coffee Bean Caucus by dropping one into a jar on behalf of their favoured candidate. In the months before the caucus, candidates are as ubiquitous as salt and pepper shakers. Over the years, the restaurant, known for its omelets, counts presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama among those it has fed.

On Monday, the two parties will hold caucuses at 1,681 precincts throughout the Midwestern state, a “gathering of neighbours” in which attendees openly declare their allegiance to a candidate.

With so many vying for the Democratic nomination for president, Iowa was overrun by politicians this summer.

For the Atlas-Lacey family, the invasion of handshaking, baby-kissing aspirants provided an opportunity. Who needs FOX or CNN when the real thing is appearing down the block?

After seeing Biden in the flesh, the family hit a jackpot at the Iowa State Fair, where they met John Hickenlooper (“he shortly after dropped out,” Lacey said) and Cory Booker (“good baby grip,” she noted). Booker, a vegan, made headlines that day by eschewing the fair’s more popular fare of pork-chop-on-a-stick for a fried peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.

That same month they also met Michael Bloomberg (before he formally entered the race) at a forum on gun control and Bernie Sanders at a town hall hosted by the reproductive rights group NARAL.

“Bernie declined to hold him,” Lacey said, though the curmudgeonly senator from Vermont did pose with Orin. It was old hat for Grandpa Bern, as he is known in his family, who has seven grandchildren.

At some point, the pursuit became a little bit of a game. Bringing a baby is also a ticket to be pressed forward to meet the candidate.

In Tipton (pop. 3,221), Pete Buttigieg held a rally attended at the Cedar County Fairgrounds. The candidate, who turned 38 in January, cradled Orin in his left arm, though the baby was distracted by a dog held in the arms of a nearby well-wisher. A photograph was posted on Instagram, gaining more than 40,000 likes. (One woman stated: “This baby is a little tank! Adorable!”)

The baby’s grandfather, the Toronto film critic Liam Lacey, posted a tongue-in-cheek comment: “Orin approves of the candidate closest to his age.”

In Davenport, Orin met billionaire candidate Tom Steyer. “My son liked his climate-change stickers,” his mother said, “and chewed on one most of the time.”

In Liberty, he met Kamala Harris, reaching out to touch the rings on her hand.

In Cedar Rapids, Orin was held by Amy Klobucher at the opening of her local campaign office. “He doesn’t blink much,” she noted. “He’s kind of a serious baby.”

Back in Iowa City, he met Elizabeth Warren, an indefatigable campaigner who looked fresh at the end of a long day even as she embraced a sleepy baby.

At the steak fry in Des Moines, he met Beto O’Rourke and Andrew Yang, who “sort of picked him up like a fish he just caught,” the mother said.

At a campaign office, Julián Castro, a father of two, spent some quality time with the boy and they seemed to have a good rapport. Castro might have made the extra effort because the previous month he had been mildly booed for declining to hold a baby at a forum for candidates in Philadelphia. “I’m not going to be the typical politician,” he said then. “I’ve been shaking a million hands. I don’t want to hold her baby.”

If you’re keeping score at home, Orin met a former vice president (Biden), five senators (Sanders, Warren, Klobucher, Booker, Harris), a former cabinet secretary (Castro), a former governor (Hickenlooper), a former congressman (O’Rourke), a mayor (Buttigieg), a millionaire entrepreneur (Yang), and two billionaires (Steyer, Bloomberg), not to mention a pair of Rhodes scholars in Booker and Buttigieg.

Proud parents — his American father works in agriculture technology, his Canadian mother is a lawyer who graduated from Osgoode Hall in Toronto — celebrated Orin’s first birthday on Thursday at home in Berkeley, Calif.

Not every baby can say he was bounced by Booker and cuddled by Klobucher before ever enjoying his own birthday cake. He also appeared in campaign photographs posted by the Des Moines Register, the Cedar Rapids Gazette and the Iowa City Press-Citizen.

Incredibly, not one of the candidates caused the cute tyke to spit up. He has a strong stomach and, depending on the outcome of November’s election, he might need it.

His mother was asked which candidate her baby preferred.

“He was most responsive to Castro,” she said, “but I think at this stage he would probably endorse me.”