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to ethanol is simple.

"People understand you don't get through the Iowa caucus without supporting ethanol," he said.

Iowa is the nation's leader in ethanol production.

And while those in the Hawkeye State are busy making fuel from fields, they are busy making friends from funds.

Iowa agricultural services and products lined politicians' pockets with more than $214,000 in 2008, according to Open Secrets.

"It's all about who can give the candidates the most money to get into office," said Merlin Stuhr, an eastern Nebraska corn and soybean farmer.

David Redlawsk, a campaigns and voting strategy professor at the University of Iowa, said this presidential election cycle was unusual with both sides being wide open coming into Iowa. Each candidate was so engaged, he said, that candidates who once opposed ethanol switched their stances.

Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain was once a harsh critic of the corn-based product, but he was whistling a different tune before the January Iowa caucus.

"I had my glass of ethanol this morning, and I'm feeling good," McCain told a 2007 Des Moines crowd.

Eventually, they all fall in line, Goss said.

"Ethanol is political football for votes," said M.E. "Bus" Whitehead, founder of the Lincoln, Neb., Whitehead Oil. "If I were campaigning in Nebraska like Clinton or Obama, I would love ethanol."

National politicians love corn ethanol - but resist discussing its faults, Lieberman said.

"They can be excellent on the stump and speak intelligently without communicating anything they don't want to," said Lieberman. "So, to avoid a corn ethanol confrontation, they go right back to national security."

Because of the money intertwined into the relationship, economist Goss said he could see a storybook ending.

"If I were to write a great book," Goss said, "it would be about an ethanol plant going up in a rural community. And a guy in town starts cooking up something in his cellar that would make corn-based ethanol obsolete. Then the ethanol, big-corn guys come and bump him off."

Learn more about this author, Cassie Fleming.
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