With Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses finally upon us, will all of the time, effort, and televised media invested actually matter in the selection of the 2008 Republican presidential nominee? Even for the two candidates, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, with any chance of winning, it is easy to imagine that a victory could turn out to be a springboard to, well, nothing.
Not that such a fate would be unprecedented. Of the past four presidents, only the current White House occupant won the Iowa caucuses during his initial presidential run. Though hard to believe now, in 1980 Ronald Reagan lost this heartiest of heartland states to George H.W. Bush, who, eight years later as the incumbent vice president and his party's heir apparent, promptly lost Iowa to Bob Dole. Even the current President Bush's 2000 victory meant so little that Sen. John McCain squashed him in New Hampshire the following week. The notion of an Iowa bounce for Republican hopefuls is a myth that should have been buried in a time capsule long ago next to the Phil Gramm for President paraphernalia.
And yet, to paraphrase The Gipper, whose legacy has been claimed this year by every Republican presidential aspirant with a surname longer than four letters, Here We Go Again.
The contest between Huckabee and Romney has become quite combative during the final weeks. This should surprise no one. After all, it's hard to create a more unusual pairing from among the GOP's four-and-a-half major candidates. (The half-candidate is Fred Thompson, of course, whose lackluster and lazy campaign may effectively end in Iowa anyway.) Romney is the wonkish, wealthy, transplanted Northeastern Mormon with a perfectly cut jaw and hairdo. Huckabee is the homegrown, bootstrapped, preacher-politician from the rural South with no political pedigree who suffered severe weight problems.
Contrasts between the two men go beyond the biographical. Romney has contributed more of his personal fortune to the campaign than Huckabee has raised and spent overall. Romney's campaign is difficult to contact, and his handlers often prevent the media from questioning him at events; Huckabee's campaign is so camera-starved that on Monday he let the media cover him getting a haircut and straight-razor shave in Des Moines. (Take that, John Edwards!)
Or take policy. Romney is a conservative Johnny-come-lately who has responded to questions about his legitimacy by staking out wildly overcompensating ideological positions -- such as his promise to "double" Guantanamo. Last week, two of his hometown newspapers undermined his recent hard-line conversion. The Boston Herald fronted a piece about Romney failing to keep locked up a felon who later killed a couple in Washington state. The next day The Boston Globe ran a scoop about Romney's recent conversion to the anti-abortion position; in 2006 he approved a $5 million bond for a western Massachusetts Planned Parenthood facility. Romney is chasing the party as it moves dangerously to the right.
Huckabee, meanwhile, has tacked left in an attempt to rehabilitate the "compassionate conservatism" mantle long ago abandoned by President Bush. He talks about the need for health care and has offended conservatives with moderate views on immigration. He has withered soft-on-crime critiques for parole recommendations for a convicted rapist and later convicted murderer. Rush Limbaugh frequently lambastes him.
Last week Romney released a pair of negative ads directed at Huckabee. The ads started by noting that both men are pro-life and support a constitutional ban on gay marriage, but the first went on to call Huckabee too supportive of clemency for criminals, and the second to criticize him for supporting state tuition for children of illegal immigrants. Any pundit who had suggested a year ago that Romney would be attacking Huckabee from the right, and successfully so, would have been thrown out of the national press corps. "I think we had to believe that [the ads] were hurting us," Huckabee conceded during a pre-haircut press conference Monday.
Said press conference, incidentally, may be remembered as the turning point of the 2008 Iowa race and surely joins the rich pantheon of bizarre moments in modern presidential history. In the Des Moines Marriott, Huckabee announced that he initially planned to show Romney's two attack ads and then reveal his campaign's new negative ad in response. However, Huckabee said, an hour before the presser was to begin, he decided to pull his ad. Then, in a transparently manipulative maneuver, he showed the pulled ad to the media anyway. What's uncertain is whether the dog-whistle effect of the decision to feign outrage about going negative (Huckabee ran some tough negative ads during his Arkansas days), may actually rally his supporters and potential supporters, despite the national media's near-universal dismissal of the move as a crass stunt.
The result of this strange twist, and Huckabee's late-autumn surge, is not in doubt: Romney's long-held lead in Iowa is gone. Despite far fewer resources, Huckabee manufactured a Huck-a-boom. Even if the sampling method slightly favors first-time caucus-goers, the final Des Moines Register poll, released on New Year's Eve, showed Huckabee ahead of Romney, 32 percent to 26 percent. This surely sent a wave of panic through the Romney campaign.
With one notable exception, Huckabee's support is surprisingly consistent. Among men and women, young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural, Huckabee's support levels among potential Republican caucus-goers are bounded in a tight range between 28 percent and 37 percent, making his support relatively uniform across various demographic subgroups. That lone exception, however, is critical to his chances of winning: The former Baptist minister draws support from 47 percent of self-described fundamentalist Christians.
Still, tonight's outcome is unclear. Did Romney, who led the race for months and poured millions of dollars into television ads, peak too early? Or did Huckabee, who rose in the polls at what normally would be exactly the right moment, do so too late to be able to organize all the late converts into actual caucus-goers? "It's difficult for him to get all those church organizations to work together, and it takes some top-down campaign organization to make that work," says political scientist Jay Barth of Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. "It's a very risky strategy, but it's the only strategy he has … but you'd have to bet on Romney by virtue of his organizational headstart." On the other hand, one expert on religion and politics who asked not to be identified, says Huckabee has been quietly cultivating church support and was communicating with pastors as early as July, surging only when Sam Brownback's departure turned Christian heads toward Huckabee.
The 2008 Iowa Republican caucuses may be remembered as an exercise in electoral futility, or at least vanity, for these two former governors. The nomination could very well go to neither of them, which means that the three candidates who essentially skipped Iowa -- McCain and Rudy Giuliani by conscious choice, and Thompson as an indirect result of his lackluster and lazy campaign -- may have been wise to get out of the way of the mutually self-destructive Huckabee-Romney donnybrook.
McCain, in fact, could become the effective "winner" in Iowa. Consider that the Arizona senator bounced up to 13 percent in the final Register poll, despite investing little resources here, and would make headlines if he climbs closer to 20 percent in the final results. Whatever McCain's showing in Iowa, if Huckabee holds on to win, Romney will be damaged headed into his face-off with McCain in New Hampshire. Is it any wonder that McCain decided to fly back to Iowa on the eve of the caucuses for one last set of events designed, presumably, to twist the knife in Romney's back a little more?
Of course, if Romney loses, maybe that makes no difference whatsoever to his longer-term chances of capturing the nomination. History would, in that regard, be on his side.
