Thursday, January 03, 2008

Caucus Day   [David Freddoso]

For those of you reading at this late hour, hello from a motel room in Adair, Iowa, the first place I've had an Internet connection all day. After a truly disastrous plane trip, during which I was ripped off trying to get Wi-Fi service, and then nearly got into a fist-fight with a baggage worker on a tarmac in Cincinnati, I reached Omaha in time for supper and attended three rallies in the Des Moines area (Romney, Clinton, Obama) before driving back out into the middle of nowhere to get a couple hours of sleep. I hope to have something more complete for you today.

A couple of notes, though: despite the Des Moines Register poll, Romney should win. Public polls are mixed, but one campaign's internals put him four to seven points ahead of Huckabee. Romney's people are playing the expectations game by predicting a tie, but they will not admit the possibility of a loss. The candidate himself has predicted a win, which demonstrates that he is not trying to game expectations by portraying himself as the underdog. And then there's the fact that Huckabee has sort of done his "going-negative-by-not-going-negative" thing. This could be read in any number of ways, I admit, but campaigns go negative late when they feel they are losing.

On the other hand, Huckabee had more than 2,000 people at a rally the night before, and that is an awful lot by Iowa standards. Maybe they were expecting to see Chuck Norris blow something up.

Clinton was as underwhelming tonight as I've ever seen her. Her rally, larger than Romney's, was incredibly low-energy. She was half an hour late and her speech alternated between bedtime story and shouting match — the same weaknesses she had months ago. Her repetitive hand gestures have not changed, either. Her husband took the mic for a few minutes first — not bad, but he wasn't in top form. Not everyone at her rally was intent on supporting her.

Another note — it's funny that you can go to some of these rallies and look for caucus-goers to speak to, and then find that most of the people in attendance are volunteers from other states. This was true at both the Romney and Obama rallies — I didn't get a chance to ask many people at Clinton's rally simply because I had to rush out to catch the end of Obama's.

01/03 03:07 AMShare