Buffalo News
11-12-07
Front-runners beware as Iowa race gets more intense
By Jerry Zremski NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF
WATERLOO, Iowa — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday brought her frontrunning Democratic presidential campaign to this factory town named for the
battle where Napoleon lost his empire, ramping up her efforts in the state that
could prove to be her own Waterloo.
What’s more, Clinton — who enjoys a 22-point lead over her closest Democratic
rival in national polls but only a slight advantage here — isn’t the only frontrunner facing a tough challenge in the state that will kick off the presidential
voting with its caucuses Jan. 3.
The top Republican presidential candidate, former New York City Mayor Rudy
Giuliani, leads by about 12 percentage points nationwide but finds himself in a
four-way fight for second place in Iowa, far behind former Massachusetts Gov.
Mitt Romney.
That unusual dynamic in the battle for the presidency has made Iowa the center
ring for candidates from both parties who think they can knock out the frontrunners here.
“Barack Obama is going to win here, and then it will grow, because the
inevitability of the Clinton campaign will be shattered,” said Dr. Veronica Butler,
an Obama precinct captain for the Illinois senator in Fairfield, a small town 113
miles southeast of Des Moines.
“There’s no possible way for Giuliani to win Iowa,” said Kelly O’Brien, a county
Republican chairman in rural western Iowa who hopes a victory here will propel
either former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee or former Tennessee Sen. Fred
Thompson to the nomination.
Such hopes have given a new intensity to the Iowa race, which usually ranks
second to the New Hampshire primary in terms of attention from the candidates
and the media.
On the Democratic side, there’s a tight three-way battle for the lead among
Clinton, Obama and former
North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.
All three have spent more time in Iowa than anywhere else, and both Obama and
Edwards have appeared here far more often than Clinton, who until recently
spurned midweek campaigning in favor of doing her Senate job.
The efforts of Obama and Edwards have paid off.
“This is a real horse race coming into the stretch run,” said pollster John Zogby.
Zogby’s latest poll, taken last week, shows Clinton with a statistically insignificant
3-point lead over Obama and a slightly wider edge over Edwards.
But the top three candidates are jumbled within 3 percentage points when less
popular candidates are not included. That’s important because in Iowa’s
convoluted caucus system, candidates need to meet a threshold of support in
each precinct, usually 15 percent, to even compete, meaning that some voters
will have to gravitate to their second choice.
Taking aim at Clinton
The good news for Clinton is that she has rallied to a slight lead from the point in
the spring when her Iowa campaign seemed so stalled that a top staff member
suggested in a leaked memo that she might want to abandon her Iowa effort.
“The more voters get to know her, the more they like her,” said Mark J. Penn,
Clinton’s top campaign strategist.
Oddly, that’s exactly what Bill Burton, a Buffalo native who served as Obama’s
press secretary, said about Obama when asked why the Illinois senator was
polling strongly here, too.
With the battle so tight, Obama and Edwards have increasingly taken aim at
Clinton. In a rousing speech at the Jefferson- Jackson Dinner in Des Moines on
Saturday that supporters said could give his campaign a burst of momentum,
Obama made several obliquely critical references to the front-runner.
For example, he said the party’s best leaders “led not by polls, but by principle;
not by calculation, but by conviction.”
Asked about Obama’s comments at a Veterans Day event, Clinton cited her long
battle for universal health care and said: “I don’t know what he’s addressing. He’s
never been specific, so I can’t draw any conclusions. But you know, if you were
to look at the fights I’ve taken on for many years, it would be pretty hard to say
that they didn’t come out of conviction.”
Many Iowa voters say they still haven’t made up their minds. “We’re in that 50
percent of voters who could change their mind at any time — and do,” said David
John, a Democrat from rural Jefferson, who is torn among several candidates
and who worries that Clinton might be too divisive.
That uncertainty overshadows the Republican race, too.
“In all of my years of involvement, there’s less gravitation to one candidate than
there’s ever been,” said Steve Scheffler, president of the Iowa Christian Alliance.
“Most of the candidates’ support is rather fluid.”
Conservative Christians dominate the GOP electorate in Iowa, yet they are
largely split among Romney, Huckabee, Thompson and Sen. John McCain, RAriz.
“A lot of conservatives feel like we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place,”
said Luana Stoltenberg, an anti-abortion activist from Davenport.
Romney has built a lead by campaigning and buying television ads early and
often, but many voters echo the concerns of Stoltenberg, who worries that
Romney favored gay and abortion rights until just before his presidential race.
“We need a great candidate to beat Hillary, but we’re not really seeing it,” she
said.
As a result, the tone of the campaign is suffering, said Gwen Eilers, the
Republican chairwoman in Clayton County, in northeast Iowa.
“With some people in the Republican Party, it’s getting really vicious,” she said.
And much of the venom is aimed at the socially moderate Giuliani, who, despite
an endorsement from the Rev. Pat Robertson and inroads with evangelicals
elsewhere, remains a target of enmity among many conservative Christians here.
Asked why Giuliani was lagging in Iowa, O’Brien said: “We don’t go much for
baby-killing up here, or the whole homosexual thing, or gun control.”
Faced with Iowa county leaders with that attitude, Giuliani has not exactly made
Iowa the focus of his campaign. He has spent more time in New Hampshire,
hoping that a victory there will propel him to wins in the big Feb. 5 primary states
such as California and New York.
Giuliani has held only 37 campaign events in Iowa, a third as many as Romney
and less than half as many as Huckabee, who have campaigned hard in hopes
that the state will anoint a new Republican frontrunner, said Steffan Schmidt, a
political scientist at Iowa State University.
A volatile electorate
And with several weeks to go before votes are cast, plenty of voters could still
change their minds, Schmidt said.
“Iowa caucusgoers in general are professional political scrutinizers,” Schmidt
said. “They look at the candidates very closely, and they want to pinch them and
sniff them.”
Giuliani, though, isn’t complaining that the campaign is starting in a state that
isn’t particularly reflective of the Republican electorate at large.
“It’s been the process for a very long time,” he said last week in an interview with
KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids. “Everybody’s familiar with it. It has the benefit of
history and tradition, and I think it’s a good one.” Edwards agreed.
Campaigning in a courthouse before 200 people in Jefferson on Friday night, he
told the crowd: “Most of America sees us in 30-second sound bites. You’re in a
different place. You’ll get to see us in person and look into our eyes and ask us
questions. You’ll have to decide whether we’re sincere or not.”
jzremski@buffnews.com.