The conventional wisdom of electoral campaigns is that one can only peak too early. I think The conventional wisdom of electoral campaigns is that one can only peak too early. I think Mike Huckabee's Iowa experience disproves this. Given this year’s absurdly early, January 3 Iowa caucus date, the Huck-a-whirl peaked at what seemed like the optimal moment: Late autumn, after Thanksgiving, early enough to get a lot of national press in the weeks before Christmas but not so early that his press boomlet faded before the action heated up. But Huckabee’s problem is that he has no facility or capacity to channel all this late-phase attention and momentum into the commodities that matter: dollars in the immediate term and voters by Thursday night’s caucuses. His downtown Des Moines operation is so small that, as Time's Karen Tumulty told me yesterday, the Huckabee team has to share a bathroom with Ron Paul's staff. The emerging sense among some observers on the ground here in Iowa is that Romney, who led for months and invested tens of millions of dollars in the state, only to fall behind Huckabee and then use a negative TV ad blitz to recapture the lead, has benefited from a Huck-a-gift: The Massachusetts governor can now say he came back to win Iowa, providing a momentum that might have been yawned at had nobody ever really challenged him here. What a strange twist, indeed. [Note: Huckabee will be hosting a noon press conference to announce his own, new ad. Will provide more details about that shortly thereafter, though it will be tempting to wait until after he gets his 2:15 haircut, which is listed as a public event on his schedule today.] --Tom Schaller
